American Airlines is growing in its New York LaGuardia Airport (LGA) hub with new “sun-and-fun” destinations.
The carrier is adding four routes from LGA this winter, as first seen in Cirium schedules and later confirmed by a carrier spokesperson.
All four routes are to popular warm-weather destinations, three of which are cities in Florida. American will fly twice daily to Orlando and West Palm Beach and once daily to New Orleans and Sarasota, Florida.
These new routes begin on Nov. 5, 2024, and run through May 4, 2025.
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All four routes technically mark resumptions for the carrier, but the flights haven’t operated consistently in years. American last flew from LaGuardia to New Orleans in 2008, but it has flown the other routes more recently.
Orlando service last operated in 2021; the Sarasota and West Palm Beach routes have been flown on and off during peak winter periods over the past few seasons, Cirium schedules show.
That said, there is a unique theme among this batch of new destinations; they are all leisure-focused cities popular among winter-weary travelers in the Northeast.
In fact, all four of them are also destinations already served from LaGuardia by other airlines. Delta Air Lines, which also operates an LGA hub, flies to all four cities; JetBlue Airways flies to Orlando and West Palm Beach. Southwest Airlines also flies to New Orleans, and Spirit Airlines flies to Orlando.
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That said, JetBlue — which operates a focus city at LGA — recently announced that it would exit some LGA routes and cut capacity on others, including New Orleans and Orlando. This means American will have less competition on these new routes.
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Perhaps most interestingly, in order to add flights at the capacity-constrained LGA, American needs slots, or takeoff and landing permissions, to support each flight. Airlines can’t just pick up these slots on an ad-hoc basis, so it’s typically a zero-sum game when carriers add flights at slot-restricted airports like LaGuardia.
However, American is making no cuts from its LGA hub as part of this announcement. Turns out, the airline is actually picking up the slots coming from the break-up of the Northeast Alliance with JetBlue.
American lent slots to JetBlue to boost the carrier’s presence at LaGuardia. However, since the partnership was deemed anti-competitive by a federal judge last year, JetBlue needed to return American’s slots back to its rightful owner as part of the wind-down process.
Slots are typically use-it-or-lose-it, so if American didn’t add new routes, it could possibly lose access to these lucrative slots.
While American could “slot-squat” by adding short and relatively inexpensive-to-operate regional flights (like service from LGA to Hartford), the carrier seemingly thinks it can turn a profit on some of these popular winter destinations.
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It remains to be seen how these flights will perform, though. In recent months, airlines nationwide have consistently complained about overcapacity in some of the most popular leisure destinations, leading to downward pressure on fares.
Of course, another upside for American to launch these routes is that the airline can boost its competitiveness in New York City — a place that some aviation observers say the airline has neglected in recent years. That’s especially true now that the Northeast Alliance is history, and American needs to compete on its own for relevance in the market.
At the end of the day, travelers will have more choices as airlines face more competition on these four routes. This will hopefully lead to lower fares and more award availability in these markets during the winter.
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