United’s Playbook: What’s Next for China?

17.09.2024 - 03:06 / skift.com / Patrick Quayle / Delta Air Lines / United Airlines / Meghna Maharishi

When it comes to international travel, this past summer has been record breaking for airlines. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines continued to see a sustained increase in international bookings, with some regions — like southern Europe — becoming year-round tourist destinations. 

Airlines are betting that this demand will continue into next summer. For example, American Airlines recently released its summer 2025 schedule, which included new routes to places like Athens, Milan, Rome, Edinburgh, and Madrid. 

But at the same time, carriers are continuing to face headwinds in Asia, particularly China. Delta scrapped plans to resume its Los Angeles-to-Shanghai service in May and many other Western carriers are axing routes to China due to restrictions on Russian airspace. 

Skift spoke with Patrick Quayle, United’s senior vice president of global network planning and alliances, about the state of the airline’s network. 

Skift: A lot of Western carriers have been dropping China routes and out of the American carriers that do fly to China, United has the most capacity. Could you tell me a little bit more about United’s thinking on that. 

Quayle: Prior to Covid, we had the most capacity. We had 10 and a half flights a day going to mainland China, plus an additional three to Hong Kong. It was more than American and Delta combined, quite candidly. 

Obviously Covid happened and during Covid, the Chinese government put restrictions on U.S. airlines and they said, ‘Hey, you’re not allowed to fly here to all these places.’ If someone comes into China, you have to test 24 hours before, then you have to test 48 hours before, then it ends up being you had to test seven days before, 48 hours before, and 24 hours before. 

Assuming you pass all three of those tests, then you can get on the airplane. And then they test you again in China. If for some reason someone then tested positive in China, they would then analyze the airline, not just the U.S. airline. This is true for Emirates, this is true for British Airways, any airline, to be very clear. It’s not like anti-U.S. airlines, this is just their policy. They said we would then penalize the airline and you have to sell 50 seats less or 100 seats less or you can’t fly the next day. They had all these rules and all these penalties. 

As a result of that, as Covid has lessened and as the world opened up, the U.S. government and the Chinese government said, ‘Hey, this isn’t quite right.’ If you recall right after Covid, it was one flight — we could each have one flight and we were the only ones that were flying. It was us and Delta. And then American jumped in. We just started our LA-Shanghai flight, so we have three flights a day going to mainland