American Airlines has gone to war with United in Chicago, and United is fighting back. It’s a war where United clearly has the advantage.
- They’re bigger in Chicago
- They have more gates, and American can’t really grow. American just lost 3 gates to United.
- They’re based in Chicago and have the city and governor on their site
- They’re profitable, so in a better position to stem losses that go along with excess capacity from ‘strategic’ flying.
United actually announced a big ramp up in Chicago the morning of American’s earnings call in order to guarantee that financial analysts would pressure American on its strategy in fighting for the city in a way likely to generate losses.
Still, I love to see airlines to head to head. And I especially love to see American – which for years has eschewed direct competition of almost any kind – having some fight left in them.
But what’s funny is that part of United’s playbook isn’t just playing analysts and dumping capacity. It’s also trolling. Whenever they get into a fight with another airline they take out billboard ads, and sometimes social media ads. They did it with Southwest in Denver. They did it against American in Chicago a little bit a year ago.
Here are United’s latest, which I hadn’t seen:
“AAdvantage, United” feels a bit too on the nose to me, since United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby was directly responsible for much of the devaluation in the AAdvantage program during his time as President of American Airlines. It came at his direction, or that of United’s current Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Nocella.
The AAdvantage team didn’t want to copy Delta and United with revenue-based points-earning. They preferred premium fare bonuses, but were overruled. The AAdvantage team didn’t like the name ‘Platinum Pro’ for their new 75K elite tier (believing the name sounded too much like an employee of a Nevada whorehouse) but Kirby stuck them with it. On April 8, 2014 AAdvantage eliminated double miles standard awards, taking away last seat award availability at reasonable prices, and eliminated distance-based awards altogether – without any advance notice. Members felt massacred. That came from top levels of former US Airways management, too.
So to the extent there’s an AAdvantage, United today it’s because Kirby did damage to American before he wound up helping to revitalize United.
UA seems to want ORD to become PIT or STL for AA.
To the extent “Kirby did damage to American before he wound up helping to revitalize United” he did it with Doug Parker’s permission.
This. Is. Just. Blog. Hype. No one IRL cares at all. Unless and until fares actually drop, devaluations stop, and publicly available deals emerge, this isn’t a real ‘turf’ war. It’s astro-turfing.
United has and is now doing a disservice to the flyers at ORD. They cannot and do not go everywhere people need to go. Pritzker and Johnson, once again, are derelict in their duties to serve the people of Chicago and Illinois. Competition is a good thing in the Airline Industry since having only one choice leaves travelers at the mercy of the only game in town.
Shows you how dumb these execs are. No normal passenger is going to understand the AAdvantage reference.
@Mike — 100%. Tone deaf.
Yesterday was the culmination of the season of differentiation between the big 3. DL kicked off earnings season with earnings that everyone knew could not be topped in the US airline industry and added a cherry with the 787 order, proving that DL is the only US airline that can source both narrowbodies and widebodies from both Airbus and Boeing and profitably operate and sustain all of that complexity.
UA posted earnings last week and did its usual bragging – all to hide the fact that DL earned 50% more than UA even though UA flew 10% more ASMs.
Yesterday, AA’s earnings showed how bad of a situation the company is in and the fact that they cannot turn things around which does have implications for why they can’t execute on operations or maintaining even their current fleet; financial health is not disconnected from the passenger experience.
And, in its usual arrogance, UA trolled AA while DL announced the Airbus widebody order.
Kirby and co. talk about running a company based on emotion and yet he demonstrates the least amount of emotional maturity of practically any US CEO
While AA continues to underperform and UA thinks it is its job to take out every airline not named DL – with which UA will never win any contest – DL doubled down on going after the one key distinction that UA touts as its advantage – the international market.
DL already has the most versatile, efficient and capable international fleet and the distance between DL and the rest of the US industry will only grow.
A rejuvenated WN poses a bigger threat to UA – which is running a far more reliable operation than UA – than any other of the big 3. Maybe WN will take out billboards in DEN and other UA hub cities (which are often also WN “hub” metros) and highlight how well WN did the Wall Street Journal’s rankings of airlines – and how bad UA did.
This has been quite the week in the airline industry and highlights what is in store for 2026 and beyond.
As a UA 1K, I’d also note that AA has a far better frequent flyer program than UA. UA can puff all they want, but that’s the single biggest difference between these two very similar airlines.
When it comes to the airlines we have little choice and no real competition like we once had.
@Tim Dunn — Brag all you want while you can. Delta is a VERY similar airline to UA and AA, and its very meh hub locations will almost certainly bring it down to earth in the very foreseeable future. Like how much will the insanity in MSP cost DL in the next 5 years? It’s obvious to everyone now that the economic future of this country is in Texas and Florida, not Minnesota and Michigan.
@Chopsticks — I’m with you that all airlines (and businesses, and people) are about to struggle, because there’s a silent recession, growing louder and louder. Nah, Texas is oil and Florida is tourism/corruption; that’s not much of an economy. California and New York still run the show.
@Chopsticks — As far as the top-tier earnable frequent flyer programs, I’d argue Delta Diamond is still better than AA Executive Platinum and UA Premier 1K. I’ve been each, and the GUCs and RUCs actually confirm in-advance as opposed to the SWU and PlusPoints. JetBlue Mosaic’s Move to Mint are similar to Delta, so that’s a plus, but it’s a smaller airline and program. These days, it’s not even worth considering complimentary upgrades, because they’re so few and far between, even at top.
If I move back to Chicago, I’ll still be flying with AA (I fly OneWorld as well). One thing I would like to see AA have is a subscription model for Premium Economy like UA does.
Tell us how much the insanity in Minneapolis impacted the airport since you are convinced that the media has turned all of Minnesota into a wasteland.
Of course you can’t show us data to back up your point because it hasn’t happened.
And the point about hubs is that DL figured out years ago that “owning” its hub markets provides the financial strength that AA and UA are now fighting over
and if you think Illinois is some thriving bastion of economic growth while MI and MN are not, you are as biased as you are ignorant.
NW”s dual Midwest hub strategy which DL has only expanded on means that DL owns not just its big 4 hub metros but also the Midwest and SE other than S. Florida.
AA and UA would love to be able to say that about as much of the US as DL can say.
none of which changes that DL is sitting back and watching this all play out in Chicago and doubling down on DL’s growth in the parts of the world where UA is strongest.
UA can decide to fight a battle with AA or let DL clean up in key international markets. Since DL has so much more financial strength than UA, Kirby’s best strategy might well be to fight AA where it likely will win some territory – even as DL wins in more and more international markets with larger, more efficient and longer range aircraft..