American Airlines executives reiterated their plans on a fourth quarter of 2023 earnings call to eventually have all the airline’s content available via New Distribution Capability (NDC) or direct channels. Vasu Raja, chief commercial officer, said that as the company goes forward, “we’re going to lean further into this.” He added, “We need to make it easy for our customers to consume our content through the internet.”

In the fourth quarter, 80% of bookings came through American’s website, app or NDC, compared with 69% in the fourth quarter of 2022. Robert Isom, CEO, said the company was “a little surprised” at how quickly the transition happened.

Fourth-quarter domestic revenue from business travel was at about 90% of 2019 levels, according to Isom. The ratio between unmanaged business and managed, said Raja, was almost 3 to 1, with unmanaged business more than 100% recovered from 2019 and managed business less so.

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