As they say in sports, numbers don't lie.
Based on what it has seen so far in the last six weeks between spring break and the Easter/Passover holidays, and the number of bookings for the upcoming summer travel season, American Airlines is pulling all its planes out of storage.
Maya Leibman, American Airlines' Chief Information Officer, has sent a memo to some employees to share the "real upswing in business" that the airline is currently seeing, according to the aviation blog One Mile At A Time.
Leibman told employees that, although capacity is still down about 40 percent compared to 2019 numbers, bookings last week through aa.com and the American Airlines app were up 150-400 percent compared to last year, and within a few points of 2019; bookings last weekend were even higher than they were over the same weekend in 2019; the last seven days have been American's biggest revenue days since the start of the pandemic almost 14 months ago; and American had a nearly 80 percent load factor on domestic flights last week
As a result, American plans to 'unground' all planes and have all aircraft in the air no later than next month.
"These are stats we haven't seen in a year," Liebman told fellow employees. "And all I'm hearing from my friends and family are their travel plans for this summer - you probably are too. It feels like there's this incredible pent-up demand to GO SOMEWHERE!"
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