Originally Posted by
HaleiwaFlyer
Thats good and all for LAX, but AA could have been much stronger at LAX and JFK if they wanted to. Pretty much AA's sunbelt strategy has cut strategic planning for LAX/JFK as leader hubs in AA's vision. Their discussion on A321XLR roll out and sunbelt strategy spelled this out as they didn't see much revenue growth at either JFK nor LAX. Until AA's management feel LAX is a winner in the future, I don't see much growth here, unfortunately as I personally am a big fan of LAX AA premium service team. They rather grow PHX, which in my opinion is a complete dump of an airport for premium flying.
Absolutely - AA did not have to let its capacity drop 25% at LAX and decimate its international ops due to renovations. Letting UA replace it on LAX-HKG and LAX-PEK routes (albeit if the US-China bilateral flying slots are increased closer to pre-COVID #'s, those routes will likely lose big $ as they did pre-COVID), shuttering operations to deep South America like EZE (although no one's replaced those for a reason), and keeping FFD closed are choices.
But back to the earlier discussion - do you think AA will choose to give up gates it has invested millions of dollars to renovate? If the answer is no, then there will be significant capacity increases. In fact in early 2025 AA is restarting daily non-stops from LAX to Columbus and Pittsburgh - with the current 2025 schedules, they have the biggest increase in domestic capacity planned (and we've heard murmurs of them being interested in airports like Singapore w/ the incoming 787-9 in the heavy Premium configurations which would likely have to be from LAX).
But in comparison to other airports, LAX is not somewhere any airline is expecting major growth to drive revenue - LAX is down ~13% vs 2019 in domestic passenger counts and ~8-9% overall. Compared to other airports, it's a market that's declined vs a PHX or DFW where passenger counts are up 10% vs 2019. The idea of focusing on the Sun Belt is not a bad one - it's the retrenching from competitive markets that's the odd choice. It looks like AA's strategy looks to be to gradually return capacity until its renovations at LAX conclude around 2028 (which may go longer) hoping demand returns back to 2019 levels by then.
At JFK AA has created a weird position where they won't return to their earlier stronger position, but they've gone on the record promising many P2P direct routes to Europe (mentioned Scandinavia, secondary Spain, Portugal, Germany) from JFK (and PHL) starting in mid-2026 with the A321XLR so capacity should jump there too. To me it looks like they overestimated the COVID impact on travel and took this as a time to reduce their debt load, retire their old fleets hurting their widebody capacity, and push out their return to competitive markets to 2026-2029 which was foolish, but us on the coasts should get much more between 2026-28.