American Airlines bets on non-stop travel demand, relaunches India flights

American Airlines relaunched flights to India this week, nearly a decade after stopping them, looking to capitalise on growing demand for non-stop travel amid the coronavirus pandemic, a senior executive of the airline told Reuters.

With travel demand bouncing back at home, American Airlines wants to expand its international network and India was “one of the biggest untapped markets” for it, said Tom Lattig, managing director of EMEA sales.

“A lot of customers really want to fly non-stop, particularly as we’ve come through the pandemic. We know there is huge demand for travel between India and the United States so there is an opportunity right now in the middle of the pandemic to come back,” Lattig said in an interview in New Delhi.

American Airlines, which suspended services to India in 2012, started flying between New Delhi and New York on the weekend and will add flights between India’s tech city of Bengaluru and Seattle in March.

If it succeeds with those two routes, it will add services to India’s financial capital of Mumbai, Lattig said. The expansion would also depend on the availability of aircraft as it awaits deliveries of wide-body aircraft from Boeing, he said.

“There are more opportunities than we actually have aircraft for,” Lattig said.

The US carrier is already flying 90 per cent of its pre-pandemic capacity at home and has even deployed wide-body planes on some routes, Lattig said.