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Delta is operating more Boeing 767s on transatlantic routes than expected because of new Airbus A350 and A330 delivery delays.
U.S. airlines are aggressively pulling back capacity in the domestic market because too many seats on offer in the first half of 2024—with stubbornly low fares—have taken a toll on yields. But the international market is a different story, with strong demand at profitable prices pushing American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines to focus on growing global route networks. Those carriers are particularly bullish about international flying in the northern hemisphere winter season.
“From what we see from the data, international ticket sales are still outpacing domestic ticket sales in terms of year-over-year growth rates,” Airlines for America (A4A) chief economist John Heimlich told ATW, noting the trend has held steady throughout the year.
And the big swings in demand between the summer and the winter are not as apparent as they were pre-pandemic.
“We are seeing a trend that people are willing to travel more in the winter than before,” Delta director international network planning Jooyoung Kim said. “Delta is trying to find where the demand is going … Over the last couple of years, Delta has been successfully expanding our network offerings in the winter season.”
United Airlines CCO Andrew Nocella said US airlines’ domestic capacity had been reduced “at a rapid pace starting in mid-August.” He told analysts in October on United’s third-quarter earnings call that the drawdown in domestic seats was likely to continue into 2025.
“At the same time, international remains strong,” buttressed by rising business traffic, “which is our bread and butter,” Nocella said. On international routes in particular, “we can march towards higher margins.”
Comparing first-quarter 2025 schedules to the same period in 2024 via an A4A analysis, U.S. airlines are operating 77.7% more seats to Greece; 23% more to South Korea: 19.9% more to Hong Kong; 16.1% more to Brazil; 12.4% more to Argentina; and 37.4% more to China—even as the Chinese market continues to have relatively low demand and access restrictions. Markets that will see Q1 year-over-year-capacity drops are mature markets with slight reductions, such as Japan (seats down 1.7%) and the UK (down 2.8%).
U.S. majors are “adding routes and seats internationally more than they’re trimming,” Heimlich said. He noted U.S. airlines have taken 19% of systemwide capacity out this year. “You’re talking they’re 81% the size they were a year ago and a lot of that is coming out domestically.”
Delta and United will be slightly up year-over-year in terms of international seats in Q1 2025, while American, already the largest international carrier operating from the U.S., is slightly down.
But international capacity for Q1 2025 is significantly above the pre-pandemic Q1 2019 figures, indicating the summer-winter demand imbalance has narrowed.
According to an analysis of OAG data, American will operate 19.1% more international seats in Q1 2025 compared to the same period in 2019. Delta’s Q1 2025 international capacity is up 12.5% versus 2019 and United’s is up 20%.
United is unveiling a number of new winter routes, including flying between New York Newark and Marrakech, Morocco, for the first time. It will also operate between Houston George Bush Intercontinental and Medellin, Colombia, and between Newark and Dominica in the Caribbean.
United senior VP global network planning and alliances Patrick Quayle said the airline was trying to serve the “widest range of places” during the winter.
United plans to have its largest-ever winter schedule to Africa, including Washington Dulles to Dakar, Senegal. Previously, United planned to serve the San Francisco-Seoul Incheon route 1X daily in the winter but will now continue the 2X weekly summer schedule through the winter.
DELIVERY DELAYS
The impediments to growing international traffic are generally not about lack of passenger demand, but external factors, Heimlich said. The most significant is aircraft delivery delays, with airlines forced to operate older aircraft on routes on which they had planned to put newer aircraft. Delta, for example, is operating more Boeing 767s on transatlantic routes than it would prefer because of Airbus A350 and A330 delivery delays.
“We’ve been living with this for a while, so we’re getting used to it,” American managing director global network planning Jason Reisinger, told ATW. “We plan accordingly. So, it is a challenge that we live with, but we didn’t end any service this winter to any destinations where we wanted to fly.”
American launched in October what is now its longest route with daily service between its Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) base hub and Brisbane, Australia. The seasonal winter service covers 8,338 mi. (7,246 nm), the farthest nonstop route offered by American, surpassing Los Angeles-Sydney, which spans 7,491 mi. (6,510 nm).
American planned to operate a new Boeing 787-9 with an updated seating configuration on the DFW-Brisbane route but has been forced to operate an older 787-9 because of delivery delays. Brisbane becomes American’s second destination in Australia after Sydney.
“While we originally planned to operate a new 787-9, with the new seat configuration, we rearranged our schedule” so the older 787-9 would be available, Reisinger said. “We’re able to make it work so that we’ll maintain the Brisbane flight even without that delivery. It did hamper our plans, but that’s part of our job to figure that out.”
The DFW-Brisbane route is attractive to American because JV partner and fellow oneworld member Qantas has a hub there. “The South Pacific has a large increase in demand for winter, as it is their summer,” Reisinger said. The DFW-Brisbane route will “leverage both our large Dallas hub and Qantas’ connections in Brisbane. In Dallas, on peak winter days, we’ll have four South Pacific daily flights between the two of us to Auckland, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.”
Delta will fly 211 international routes during the winter, 16 more than a year ago. Among the new routes are Tampa-Amsterdam; Orlando-London Heathrow; New York JFK-Lagos, Nigeria; Minneapolis-Mazatlan, Mexico; and Detroit-Tulum, Mexico.
Delta is also launching winter service to Brisbane with flights from Los Angeles. “We are offering our largest ever schedule to the South Pacific,” Kim said.
Flights to the Caribbean and Latin America have always been a winter focus for US carriers, and that will be no different for winter 2024-25. Delta and LATAM Airlines Group marked the two-year anniversary of their antitrust-immunized JV in October, noting the airlines combined have carried 5 million passengers on 32,000 JV flights between North and South America.
“LATAM is our newest joint venture partner in our global network and it’s moving pretty quickly,” Kim said. “It’s definitely creating a lot of synergies and enabling the two carriers to grow more. There will be more and more synergy coming. It’s not fully synergized yet.”
American remains the leading US carrier flying to Latin America, with its Miami hub serving as a gateway to the region. Flights to South America in particular have been “pretty solid lately, and we have a really large footprint,” Reisinger said. “We’re the largest US carrier in South America, and probably by a decent amount.”
American has a 5.2% stake in Brazilian airline GOL. “We’re adding a lot of Rio service,” he added. “I think we’re up about 70% this winter over last year.”
CAPACITY CAPS
Another potential impediment to international growth is governments moving in some markets to restrict capacity. The most recent example is the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) capping capacity at Dublin Airport (DUB) to 25.2 million passengers for the 2025 summer schedule period spanning April through October—1 million below the previous summer. The IAA conceded the action will decrease airlines’ access to DUB, adding it “anticipates that the demand for slots for the summer 2025 scheduling season will significantly exceed the 25.2 million seat cap.”
The cap is meant to ensure DUB stays below an annual cap of 32 million passengers that was put in place in 2007 in an effort to ease road traffic around the airport.
A4A has deemed the cap a violation of the US-EU Open Skies agreement, and Aer Lingus and Ryanair are fighting it legally, but the Irish High Court ruled in early November that the cap must remain in place while the EU and Irish court cases are ongoing.
“We don’t want an artificial restriction on the marketplace, and especially one that is based on some very long-ago study on road traffic that the Dublin Airport says is obviously not reflective of the current road infrastructure,” Heimlich said. “In our view, there’s a market … to go to and from Dublin. We want to provide that service. And thus far, the Irish Aviation Authority is telling us, ‘No, we’re going to have to restrict the number of annual passengers.’ They’re going to do that through a slot allocation that will have distortive effects on the market and distortive effects on the competitive landscape.”
He added that efforts to restrict the number of short-haul domestic flights in France will have knock-on effects on international demand.
“I think people forget, if you limit some of the domestic connecting options, you might be limiting the feasibility of some international trips that involve short-haul domestic connections,” Heimlich explained. “There are a lot of markets, domestic or foreign, where 70% of your traffic could be connected. A few passengers per flight can make or break the profitability of an international route.”
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