American Airlines, travel company? Listen to the carrier’s chief commercial officer, Vasu Raja, for any amount of time and it’s clear change is afoot at the world’s largest airline.
The airline business has changed for American Airlines. So-called blended trips, or those that include both business and leisure aspects, are driving the company’s growth as it emerges from the pandemic.
American Chief Commercial Officer Vasu Raja, speaking at the Skift Global Forum on Tuesday, said nearly half of the airline’s revenues now come from these blended trips. What’s more, this new classification of trip is driving the carrier’s revenue growth more than anything else today.
“What the pandemic really unlocked, and the recovery from it, is the great merging,” Raja said. “People don’t need to keep need to keep a work life for five days, personal life for two days, and carve out two weeks a year for vacations.”
world’s largest and best travel rewards program,” Raja said. He added how travelers are able to earn and redeem points across a wide group of global partners to more destinations at better rates than any other such program.
“That American Airlines does everything,” he said apparently referring to the the company in the broader travel company sense. “But American Airlines also runs an airline, that happens to be called American Airlines too.”
The airline side of its business, he said, is increasingly adding flights on North American routes where it sees the biggest return for its growth, particularly from blended trips. Internationally, travelers can get to where they need to go via connections with American’s partners, including British Airways, Japan Airlines, and Qatar Airways. American, the airline, is still flying to faraway destinations but has increasingly focused this long-haul flying on partner hubs, for example Doha and London.
“Increasingly, where we choose to go and fly our flights, will realistically be probably a lot more heavily in the domestic system,” Raja said. “[It] probably will be for a while due to nothing other than the fact that right now the North American demand base has recovered at a far greater rate than the rest of the world.”