LATAM Airlines is in Growth Mode

After spending the past four to five years ironing out the details of its widely publicized merger, LATAM airlines has emerged with a flurry of announcements about new routes to destinations throughout the United States and Europe.

Over the past several months LATAM has announced new offerings to Tel Aviv, Israel; Boston, Massachusetts; Lisbon, Portugal; Rome, Italy and Munich, Germany, to name a few.

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And most recently in June, LATAM revealed that it will be the only South American airline providing passengers a direct flight from Sao Paulo to Las Vegas. The Sin City offering is LATAM’s sixth gateway in United States with direct flights to South America, and the fifth U.S. city with direct flights to Brazil.

Altogether in 2018, LATAM will add 17 new international routes.

“Our main thinking is that we need to expand our network and give our passengers all of the options they need,” Pablo Chiozza, senior vice president of the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Asia, LATAM Airlines Group, told TravelPulse during an interview this week.

“We’re in a different stage of the company now,” Chiozza continued. “When LAN and the former TAM got together 2012, we went through four or five years of merger related activity, unifying everything and now the merger times are over and we are looking forward to growth.”

That growth will naturally be strategic, based on providing flights to destinations that make sense for Brazilians and travelers from South America.

For instance, the decision to add Boston to its roster of year-round, direct flights had much to do with the U.S. city’s significant Brazilian population.

“Brazilians are mainly in South Florida and that area is pretty well covered by us already,” explained Chiozza. “But the second place you do see a lot of Brazilians is in the Boston area and all of those passengers of course are already flying to Brazil but doing it through New York or Miami.”

With LATAM’s new direct flights, Boston passengers bound for Brazil will no longer have to make a connection.

As for the Tel Aviv route, Brazil and Argentina are home to a large Jewish population, making that new offering a logical move as well.

And finally, Las Vegas. As it turns out, the city is a popular vacation destination for South Americans, said Chiozza. With that in mind, the airline will offer its new route to the city on a seasonal basis.

“It is a gambling destination, not a business destination, that’s the main reason why passengers are going there. So, our aim is to capture vacation travelers during those periods where south American countries are vacationing,” Chiozza said. “But with all of these routes, we’re trying to get outside the box and see how we can establish traffic more on an opportunity basis.”

The new Las Vegas flights will be operated in high-travel seasons, from June to September and December to March. The route will be served by a Boeing 767 that accommodates 191 passengers in economy class and 30 passengers in Premium Business.