According to a senior official of the Texas-based carrier, American Airlines is in the process of obtaining the necessary clearances from the US government for its codeshare agreement with IndiGo Airlines, and the relationship is expected to be operational by March 2022.
In September, American Airlines and IndiGo announced the signing of a codeshare agreement, allowing the former to sell seats on the Indian carrier’s 29-route flights through its distribution system.
After a ten-year hiatus, the Texas-based carrier restarted its New York-Delhi trip on November 12.
In an interview with PTI, American Airlines’ Managing Director (Sales) Tom Lattig said that the carrier’s Seattle-Bengaluru trip would begin operating on March 25 instead of January 4, as previously stated.
“We have not seen much corporate travel recovery yet. We know that route (Seattle-Bengaluru) in particular will depend heavily on corporate traffic, and we have made the decision to push the date,” he mentioned.
He added that the airline has over 2,000 agreements in place with various companies in the United States.
“Any of our big technology firms in North America, on the west coast in particular, which is where we expect to get traffic from for our Seattle-Bengaluru flight, we already have those corporate agreements in place,” he mentioned.
According to Lattig, American Airlines would go to those companies and offer special pricing on its new service to India. Gulf carriers such as Qatar Airways and Emirates carry a major share of traffic on India-US and India-Europe routes through their one-stop flights.
When asked how he sees the competition posed by the Gulf carriers on the India-US routes, Lattig replied: “We certainly expect to be able to take traffic on our non-stop services. To the extent the pie is going to grow — it is going to be a bigger market — we will certainly be able to take traffic and build traffic there.”
“I do expect we would be able to take traffic from airline that carry passengers via third countries (one-stop flights). Certainly, that will be the target for us,” Lattig added.
He said there is much pent-up demand for travel between India and North America.
“We see that (pent up demand) in our forward bookings. We want to fly more and more flights,” Lattig added.
When asked if the Indian government should resume scheduled international flight services, Lattig said, “It’s really up to the government to decide when they are going to open and how many flights they are going to allow.”
“We certainly hope to move towards open skies,” he added.
According to him, American Airlines is obtaining the necessary clearances from the US government for their codeshare arrangement with IndiGo.
“Once we get all the approvals, we will move into the implementation phase and we expect that to be in the first quarter of 2022,” he said.
It will be a fantastic relationship for us because it will allow us to connect passengers from North America to anyplace in India and Indian passengers to anywhere in the United States, he added.
