American Airlines will add Acapulco and Huatulco in Mexico to its network among 16 route additions this winter.
The Oneworld Alliance carrier will connect the Mexican destinations with its Dallas/Fort Worth base twice-weekly with 76-seat Embraer 175s on a seasonal winter and summer basis from 21 December, it says today. It previously served Acapulco until 2011, Cirium schedule data shows.
Other new international routes connect its Charlotte, Chicago O'Hare, New York LaGuardia and Phoenix hubs with destinations American already serves in the Caribbean and Mexico, including Chihuahua and St Thomas.
On the domestic front, the airline will connect its Miami hub to Columbia (South Carolina), Northwest Arkansas and Oklahoma City, and New York John F Kennedy to Richmond.
“As we looked at our Latin America and Caribbean network, we saw some unique opportunities to grow, providing more service to the places our customers value most,” says Vasu Raja, vice-president of network and schedule planning at American, in a statement.
The route additions come as American is in the first year of a three-year strategy to grow at its three most profitable hubs in an effort to boost margins. It will add more than 100 daily flights at its Dallas/Fort Worth hub by this summer with the addition of 15 new gates this month, and will grow at Charlotte in 2020 and Washington National in 2021.
The carrier will not face competition on most of the routes, facing off with United Airlines out of Chicago O'Hare and Delta Air Lines out of New York JFK, schedules show.
American plans to grow capacity by roughly 2.5% this year, a half-a-point reduction from its initial forecast due to the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max in March.
Source: Cirium Dashboard
