American Airlines, VP International Operations, José Freig at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit – Latin America & Caribbean 2024

Transcript

José Freig:Yeah, no, great question and thank you. And look, again, a big shout out to our network planning teams. And as they've looked at the fleet, right, they've tried what they've done with our widebody fleet as we've continued to see delays on the Boeing 787 deliveries. What they've particularly been able to do is been able to say, look, you know, we might have to start this particular route a little bit sooner or end the route, the seasonal route, a little bit, you know, earlier. As you think about when you're moving that, so there's chess piece and Tetris piece. It allows our customers to still be able to fly to where they wanted to fly. And we still, of course, are offering the service to where we wanted to go. But in some cases, we might have to end a seasonal service a little bit early and then be able to use that particular metal to start something else that was scheduled to start. Right. So sort of becomes that chess Tetris piece, right, as they become very creative to ensure that we're flying all the routes that we committed to fly. So as we think about the 787-9s now, we're at that point that we're working through that interior piece to your delays, as you mentioned, right? So we're really hopeful that that will be resolved relatively soon. And then of course, we'll get to see them in our fleet, which we're really excited about, the retrofitted aircraft coming into the fleet. So as a matter of fact, we're growing, you know, in our winter season, which is of course the peak season for the Caribbean and places the beaches in Mexico and other places. But for the Caribbean, we're going to be growing over 4%, you know, from a seat perspective and almost 6% on departures when it comes to this particular winter. So look, from our perspective, we see a very strong demand in the Caribbean. We're still very committed. Of course, as mentioned earlier on stage, we have, of course, the openings of places like Gocharrios and certainly Tortola and, you know, Grand Cayman and others that have come on board. And as we think about our future, We have, of course, South Caicos that is opening in February of next year, which is something we're really excited about as well. As we see Tijuana, right, it's a huge business sector, obviously one of the biggest cities in Mexico. There's a huge medical, certainly, industry there as well. And, you know, Valle de Guadalupe is, you know, maybe an hour or so away. And Valle de Guadalupe is, of course, kind of like the Napa Valley of Mexico. There's a lot of wine in that area as well. And then some of our customers are realizing that is kind of a hidden gem. And, and I think we're seeing some success there. So we're excited about that as well.

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