A senior official of the Texas-based carrier said American Airlines is in the process of getting approval from the US government for its codeshare agreement with IndiGo airlines and that the partnership is likely to be implemented by March 2022.
American Airlines and IndiGo had announced in September that they have entered into a codeshare agreement that allows the former to sell seats on its distribution system, which allows the Indian carrier's flights operating on 29 routes.
After a gap of 10 years, the Texas-based carrier resumed its New York-Delhi flight on November 12.
American Airlines Managing Director Sales Tom Lattig told PTI in an interview that the carrier's Seattle-Bengaluru flight would start March 25 instead of January 4 as was announced before.
We haven't seen much corporate travel recovery yet. He mentioned that Seattle-Bengaluru will depend heavily on corporate traffic and that we made the decision to push the date.
He noted that the airline has more than 2,000 agreements in place with various companies in the US.
He said that any of our big technology firms in North America, particularly on the West Coast, which is where we expect to get traffic for our Seattle-Bengaluru flight, we already have those corporate agreements in place.
American Airlines would add special pricing for them on its new service to India, Lattig said.
Gulf carriers like Qatar Airways and Emirates carry a significant share of traffic through their one-stop flights on the India-US and the India-Europe routes.
When asked how much competition is posed by 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 not believe that we will be able to take traffic from airlines that carry passengers via third countries one-stop flights, which is a goal for us, Lattig said.
We see a rise in demand in our forward bookings. He said that we want to fly more and more flights.
When asked if the Indian government should resume scheduled international flight services, Lattig said it is up to the government to decide when they open and how many flights they are going to allow. He said that we certainly hope to move towards open skies.
American Airlines is in the process of getting the approvals from the US government regarding their codeshare partnership with IndiGo, he said.
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.
He said that it is going to be a great partnership for us because it will help us connect passengers from North America to everywhere in India and the Indian passenger to anywhere in the US.