Anyone catch the significance in American’s latest announcement last week? I suppose it’s not really “significant” in any way. It’s more of the same old crap. Yup, legacy carrier tries to fight a low cost carrier in a market that they have no business being in.

This time, American is going after Spirit down in South Florida. It’s no secret that Spirit has been growing their presence out of Ft Lauderdale to a bunch of Caribbean and Latin American destinations lately. American, of course, has the huge Latin presence out of Miami, and they’ve apparently decided to try to knock Spirit down a couple notches.

So now, American is starting up Ft Lauderdale to San Jose (Costa Rica), and Santo Domingo. They’ll also beef up the number of seats from the airport to San Juan and Port-au-Prince.

Raise your hand if you think there’s really enough demand for two carriers in the market? Nobody?

It’s just the same tired old story. American probably has planned it this way . . . . Big legacy carrier moves into a market where it really doesn’t need to be. They’ll fight for awhile, potentially get the little guy out, and then they’ll pull all service out. As usual, the consumer is worse off and has to go back to paying really high fares out of Miami with no other options. But hey, American is happy!

The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work that way as well as it used to. Now, American will just waste a lot of money trying to put the little guy out of business, not succeed, quietly pull out of the markets, and go on making different dumb, revenue negative decisions. Glad I’m not a shareholder.