In 2019, just shy of 4 percent of markets would flip from American-superior to Southwest once that airline is included in the set. Let’s first take a look at the Southwest overlap markets. I broke the “superior” markets out into three different subsets as you can see above. This means there was a good eight-point growth in superiority, but we can’t just leave it at the high level, because there is nuance here.
American Advantage Market Breakdown 2024 vs 2019 Even if it’s not perfect, this will tell the story. That is pretty close to what American’s slide says, so I figure I’m more or less using the right data here. Starting with just the big three, American in 2024 has a superior network - according to its definition - in 68.2 percent of the 277 markets it serves in my dataset whereas in 2019 it was superior in 60.2 percent of the 279 markets. With this data in hand, I could really dive into this claim that American is increasing network superiority. Later, I added Southwest into the mix, because I think it matters. I then looked at markets where American has an advantage over both Delta and United in either flight frequency or number of destinations served. The mice type says this was for Continental US and short-haul Latin American spokes, so I took out American’s hubs and included the Continental US, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean in the data set. It turns out, that day was March 11 in each year. Instead of trying to match it exactly, I went with a peak day (Monday) in March 2024 and another in 2019. This chart was yet another that I could try to replicate using Cirium data, but not all the details were clear. The above chart is the crux of American’s strategic vision, and it shows - albeit again with a wildly-skewed and misleading Y axis - that American is increasingly becoming the airline with the most superior network in the markets it serves.