![southwest airline seat map southwest airline seat map](http://www.airlineseatingcharts.com/airline_seating_charts/china%20eastern%20airlines/mu_a346.gif)
In other words, there is a benefit to being in these markets, but I don’t view them as having the same benefit of network superiority as in domestic markets where there is more business, visiting friends and relatives (VFR) traffic, and competition. But it’s not a place most people will go frequently enough to make them shift all their flying. Sure, if someone is flying to Tortola Beef Island, they’ll probably fly American there. The more American can find markets like these, the better off it will be, but it’s not clear how many more there are like this.įurther, most (but not all) of these are nice vacation spots but they aren’t going to really sway loyalty from, say, a person in El Paso. Using Miami, DFW, and Phoenix, American can go into markets that others can’t serve either because their hubs don’t have the demand or they’re too far away to operate on short runways. American has figured out how to push primarily regional jets into some of these secondary markets that hold real promise. Regardless of how I feel about anything else, I absolutely love what American has been doing south of the border. New American Markets Since 2019 – Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper – copyright © Karl L. American is just trying to find markets that don’t make sense for others.įirst, we can look at new American-only markets that are served in 2024 but were not served in 2019.
![southwest airline seat map southwest airline seat map](https://www.seatlink.com/images/maps/southwest-boeing-737-700-seat-map.png)
This doesn’t take away from the fact that American has the best network in town, but it’s not like there’s any competition. Nearly 18 percent of American’s total markets in 2019 and just over 21 percent in 2024 are markets that American serves but Delta and United do not, and those count in the data. You’d think that having network superiority in a market requires there to be another airline over which American can be superior, but that’s not the case. That will be true for a subset of the population, but it’s certainly a tougher battle than in other types of markets. Yet in American’s data, it still calls itself the superior carrier here. In 2024, however, American has only 14 flights to 4 destinations while Southwest has surged to having 26 flights to 10 destinations. Even including Southwest, American could consider El Paso a market where it was superior because it had more flights. That may be true, but in some of these markets, Southwest has a distinct advantage, including our old friend El Paso.īack in 2019, American had 19 flights to 4 destinations from El Paso and Southwest had 18 flights to 9 destinations. That number is just over 6 percent in 2024.Īmerican makes the argument that it is a global network carrier, so it will have a leg up on attracting those passengers in these cities over Southwest, especially those with a global need. In 2019, just shy of 4 percent of markets would flip from American-superior to Southwest once that airline is included in the set. Let’s first take a look at the Southwest overlap markets. I broke the “superior” markets out into three different subsets as you can see above. This means there was a good eight-point growth in superiority, but we can’t just leave it at the high level, because there is nuance here. American Advantage Market Breakdown 2024 vs 2019 Even if it’s not perfect, this will tell the story. That is pretty close to what American’s slide says, so I figure I’m more or less using the right data here. Starting with just the big three, American in 2024 has a superior network - according to its definition - in 68.2 percent of the 277 markets it serves in my dataset whereas in 2019 it was superior in 60.2 percent of the 279 markets. With this data in hand, I could really dive into this claim that American is increasing network superiority. Later, I added Southwest into the mix, because I think it matters.
![southwest airline seat map southwest airline seat map](https://airlinesfleet.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Seat-Map-and-Seating-Chart-Boeing-737-MAX-8-Southwest-Airlines-1024x299.jpg)
I then looked at markets where American has an advantage over both Delta and United in either flight frequency or number of destinations served. The mice type says this was for Continental US and short-haul Latin American spokes, so I took out American’s hubs and included the Continental US, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean in the data set. It turns out, that day was March 11 in each year. Instead of trying to match it exactly, I went with a peak day (Monday) in March 2024 and another in 2019. This chart was yet another that I could try to replicate using Cirium data, but not all the details were clear. The above chart is the crux of American’s strategic vision, and it shows - albeit again with a wildly-skewed and misleading Y axis - that American is increasingly becoming the airline with the most superior network in the markets it serves.