It may still be summer, but American is already talking about talking NEXT summer. The airline put out its plans for new routes next year, and they fall into three unsurprising buckets. For the most part, this isn’t a big blitz with new, creative routes. It’s a lot of connecting the dots and returning to routes that were served before the pandemic. It’s not really headline-grabbing, but there is still a lot to think about below the surface here.
Does it seem early for American to be announcing this? I thought it did, and SVP Network Planning Brian Znotins told me it was a couple weeks before they’ve announced in previous years. Why? Brian made it clear that they are feeling more confident in Boeing’s delivery schedule than they have in awhile, so they weren’t afraid to put things out earlier. Good on you, Boeing, finally making some headway on delivery reliability.
This isn’t a full schedule for next summer. Frequencies and equipment types will change in a later load for existing routes. This is just about putting the new routes out there as early as possible. Here they are:
Back to the Future
- Miami – Milan/Malpensa 1x daily year-round from Mar 29 on a B787-8 (last operated Mar 2020)
- Philadelphia – Budapest 1x daily seasonal from May 21 on a B787-8 (last operated Oct 2019)
- Philadelphia – Prague 1x daily seasonal from May 21 on a B787-8 (last operated Oct 2019
Connecting the Dots
- Dallas/Fort Worth – Athens 1x daily seasonal from May 21 on a B787-8
World Cup Opportunism
- Dallas/Fort Worth – Buenos Aires/Ezeiza winter service extended from May 21 to Aug 3 on a B787-8
- Dallas/Fort Worth – Zurich 1x daily seasonal from May 21 to Aug 4 on a B777-200ER
Let’s get the last category out of the way first. With the World Cup coming to the US, American is making a couple of moves to cater to that traffic. Argentina will be in the World Cup, and their fans will follow their team anywhere. So the DFW seasonal service from Buenos Aires will run through summer to capture that traffic.
As for Zurich, well, Brian explained that FIFA’s headquarters is in Zurich and the World Cup’s international broadcast center will be in Dallas for the Cup next year. FIFA shared travel needs, and so this was a good opportunity for American to test out a route it thought had potential with essentially-guaranteed traffic. Note that this is the one new route on a B777-200ER. That has more premium seats onboard than the B787-8, so you can see where this is going. Governing bodies as corrupt as FIFA don’t fly coach.
As for connecting the dots, DFW – Athens is just another one of those “well, let’s see if there is such a thing as too much capacity in Athens in the summer.” Some day there will be, but we haven’t reached that point yet.
And that brings us to the first category. These three routes have flown before, but they ended with the pandemic. Setting aside MIami – Milan which is just connecting more dots, it was Budapest and Prague that will re-add some dots to the map for American.
These were all flown with B767-300ERs before the pandemic. Things were going well enough that they had planned to start flying from Chicago/O’Hare to both cities in the summer of 2020. (Remember this creepy ASMR reveal?) That obviously didn’t happen. Then during the pandemic, American made the ill-fated decision to retire all of the B767s immediately, saddling the airline with a widebody shortage that has lasted until today. Those airplanes may have been pricier to operate than a B787, but oh boy were they cheap to own. With 28 business class seats, this was a solid airplane to pioneer new routes.
Budapest and Prague both being summer leisure destinations deeper into Europe disappeared quickly and went to the end of the line to get back in the network. Besides, both could be connected via Heathrow and the British Airways hub. Even better, there was no real nonstop service to compete with from the US anyway. From Prague, United had Newark until the pandemic, but that went away. Delta didn’t come back with its summer flight unti 2022 when it restored B767-300ER service to New York/JFK. Budapest hasn’t had nonstop service to the US since 2022 when LOT Polish’s last gap effort to make Budapest work with 3x weekly over the Atlantic.
American now thinks it has an enough widebodies to give these two another go, and it sounds like this was a package deal. American says that these two cities work together very closely, probably thanks to their positioning as starting and ending points on river cruise trips and other central European vacations. Brian told me that their data in the joint venture shows 25 percent of travelers going into one come out of the other.
Meanwhile, American is well behind in these markets. Just take a look at these numbers for the 12 months ending May 2025:
Daily Passengers Each Way + Share from the US
(12 Months Ending May 2025)
ARC/BSP Data via Cirium
With American so far behind and there being little nonstop service to fight, this doesn’t seem like a bad idea. It also fits into American’s broader strategy within its joint venture with British Airways/Iberia/Aer LIngus/Finnair. While United’s partner Lufthansa gets all wound up when United flies beyond Lufthansa’s hubs, BA and friends welcome it. After all, they do much of the same into the US, serving secondary markets nonstop from their own hubs in Europe.
In particular, British Airways and Aer LIngus fly deep into the US. BA goes to Seattle, Portland (OR), San Francisco, San Diego, Las Vegas, Denver, Austin, Houston/IAH, New Orleans, Tampa, Orlando, Atlanta, Nashville, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. Aer Lingus is in Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Minneapolis/St Paul, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Nashville, Orlando, Hartford, and Newark. All of these could be reached via connections on American via its hubs, but that’s not how this partnership works. So now, American will try to do more of that in Europe, complementing cities it already flies like Copenhagen, Edinburgh, and Naples during the summer.
The only concern I have is that these are on expensive B787-8s which have only 20 business class seats. This is a premium leisure market, and it needs more premium seats. That airplane may be the best American has for this, but that’s yet another one of American’s many problems. Maybe it works in summer on the strength of that coach cabin, but that seems tougher to make work. Delta, for the record, is flying its B767s with 36 business class seats onboard to Prague. This certainly highlights a larger fleet problem at American that it has failed to rectify.
In the end, it will be nice to have service from the US to Budapest, but this is not a blockbuster announcement. It’s just a continued evolution of American’s existing strategy that drips out as more widebodies slowly get delivered.
