We’ve been talking about American’s strategy in New York for a very, very long time. The airline is undersized, and there is no clear solution. It briefly hoped it solved its problem in New York with the innovative Northeast Alliance (NEA) with JetBlue, but the court’s ruling shutting down that plan forced American to figure out yet another new path forward. Now, with no hope of a partnership to improve its fortunes in the near future, it appears the airline is shifting again.
Recently, American announced it would not be able to come to an agreement with JetBlue for a new partnership that would pass federal antitrust scrutiny. This means that in the foreseeable future, American has decided that it will just accept its position as a distant fourth place airline in the region behind Delta, United, and JetBlue. Maybe that changes with a merger or acquisition in the mid- to long-term future, but barring that, it is always going to be a laggard in the market.
So what do you do if you’re American? There have been a variety of strategies used over the years. The plan before the NEA seemed to be focused on serving smaller cities where American could provide more value to people in those places who were flying to New York. It was not about New York origin, for the most part. But that hasn’t worked very well.
In recent months, it looked like American was focusing its New York growth in leisure markets that would appeal to the local traveler. This year saw the start (or restart) of Fort Myers, Myrtle Beach, New Orleans, Orlando, Tampa, and West Palm Beach, all big sun markets. We also saw additional northeast leisure flying primarily in summer, including Burlington, Hyannis, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Portland (ME).
The idea here was to effectively focus on the leisure traveler instead of the business traveler, with some notable exceptions like LA, San Francisco, and of course, London. It could use small airplanes to serve those high-dollar markets in the northeast while it used bigger airplanes to go on the sun runs where fares were lower but demand was plentiful.
Either I didn’t quite understand the plan at the time, or it has now shifted once again. Now, American seems most interested in big markets that actually do appeal to the business traveler but also leisure. Anyone else getting whiplash?
Here’s a look at top domestic markets for all airlines based on 2024 passenger numbers with whether American served the market or not in 2023, 2025, and in the new future plan. One note here: I assumed that all summer markets served in 2025 will still be in the future plan.
Purple is newly-entered, red is exited, data via Cirium
To be fair, New Orleans, Orlando, Tampa, and West Palm Beach are all top 20 markets, so those could have been part of this new strategy to go big. But American will now also go back into Atlanta — a market it ditched during the NEA — and Fort Lauderdale. That means in the top 10 markets that can be served nonstop from LaGuardia, it will only not serve the United hubs in Denver and Houston.
American isn’t only focused on huge markets, also filling in a little below that level with Charleston (SC) on the list. But it is also going deeper into smaller markets that might have business demand. For example, Madison will now have service, and Burlington will go year-round.
With all of these adds, it means something has to go away thanks to the slot controls in place. And American will be walking away from several smaller markets:
- Cincinnati
- Dayton
- Knoxville
- Louisville
- Minneapolis/St Paul
- Omaha
- Sarasota
Of these, Minneapolis/St Paul is most surprising since it is a big market, but it is also a Delta market, and that says a great deal. In every single one of these markets, Delta is the only competitor to American. It also has a frequency advantage in all but Dayton where they each have been flying 6x weekly. Most of these are not huge markets, and American is giving up, completely ceding them to Delta. Congrats on that victory, Widget.
Instead, American will mostly push its slots into service in those bigger markets, hoping it can appeal to enough of the local corporates to possibly snag some more business travel. It think it’s better to be a small fish in a big pond than a big fish in a small pond these days.
This still feels like a spill carrier strategy to me. American doesn’t have an advantage in any of these markets over other airlines, but if it has enough breadth, it figures it can probably come in and negotiate aggressive deals to steal some traffic. These spill carrier strategies don’t tend to work out well, but then again, in a highly-constrained market like New York, it does make it a little more palatable. But still…
I can’t say I love this plan, but then again, I also can’t say I have another one short of getting a JetBlue deal done at any cost. Ultimately, none of these strategies will make American a top competitor in the region. It is just hoping to create a plan that will get it to stop losing enormous sums of money.
