Etihad Reduces Service To Los Angeles For Winter 2018

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The Big 3 Middle Eastern carriers have been showing increasing signs of fragility over the past few months with various cost cutting measures that have, up until now, not been something we’ve associated with Etihad, Emirates or Qatar Airways.

Amongst these measures have been a number of service reductions on various routes flown to the US by the ME3 and Etihad has just scheduled the latest such service cut for winter 2017/18.

Currently Etihad operates the Abu Dhabi – Los Angeles route on a daily basis with its 777-200LR aircraft but, between 15 January and 30 April 2018, that service will be reduced to just 4x/week.

From 15 January the new Etihad schedule between Abu Dhabi and Los Angeles will look like this:

EY171 AUH 08:45 – 13:45 LAX (Tue, Thu, Sat & Sun)
EY170 LAX 16:05 – 20:00+1 day AUH (Tue, Thu, Sat & Sun)

If you’re booked to fly this route after 15 January I would check your reservation carefully and, if your flight has been cut and you haven’t heard from the airline, call Etihad asap to get yourself re-accommodated.

Not As Drastic As It Could Have Been

While Etihad cutting service to LA is never going to be a good thing the cut itself isn’t as sever as it may seem.

Currently the route is served by Etihad’s 777-200LR aircraft which offer just 238 seats while the new service from 15 January will be operated by Etihad’s larger 777-300ER aircraft (reviewed here).

The Etihad 777-300ER will still offer the same 40 Business Class seats and 8 First Class seats that its predecessor did but the Economy Class cabin sees an increase of 92 seats.

Etihad 777-300ER Business Class

Overall the route will still offer 353 fewer seats/week in either direction but, had there not been an aircraft swap the, cut would have been considerably deeper.

Possible Good News

As things stand the route is scheduled to return to a daily service from 1 May 2018 and, if the schedules remain as they are, the larger 777-300ER is set to remain on the route into the summer season.

That would see the route offering a huge 644 extra seats per week in either direction and that’s a capacity increase of over 38%.

Of course these schedules are prone to being changed so, just because a 777-300ER is currently scheduled to fly the route in summer 2018, that’s no guarantee that this is what will eventually happen.

Bottom Line

Check your reservations to make sure that your flight is still scheduled to fly as expected and check your seat assignments too as they may well have changed with the aircraft swap.

Things to look out for:

• The Business Class cabins on both aircraft are nearly identical except that row 12 on the 777-300ER is missing a window so you may wish to swap out of that row if that’s your current assignment.
• Exit rows in Economy Class are in very different places on the two aircraft so, if you had an exit row seat reserved, be sure to check that this is still the case.

Overall I’m not entirely convinced that this Etihad service cut is all about cost savings but, as I don’t recall this route losing service last winter and as LA isn’t exactly a seasonal destination, I’m struggling to think of another reason Etihad would reduce capacity to LA for winter.