After each earnings call American Airlines hosts a ‘state of the airline’ meeting with employees. Not everyone gets to ask all of their questions live, so the airline collects additional questions and follows up with answers.

Those responses tend to be much more anodyne that the live ones given by top executives. Nonetheless they can sometimes reveal useful tidbits that either confirm things I thought I knew or tell me something I wasn’t already aware of. Here are some of the things that were shared with me and seemed worth passing on.

Route Network and Growth:

• American’s service to Budapest and Prague have exceeded expectations and “if that trend continues, in the future, American could add new gateways for these destinations much like we did this summer with service to Venice.”

• We know that American sees itself as focusing on Los Angeles, San Francisco and London out of New York JFK. They say they view themselves as a boutique airline serving business destinations from New York. So don’t expect leisure destinations (no matter than business travelers they want to attract are also leisure travelers). They explicitly have “no plans to fly to the Dominican Republic from JFK.”

• American has been touting their planned growth at Dallas Fort-Worth and Charlotte with new gates coming online at both airports in the next two years, however there’s not enough taxiway capacity at Charlotte to support the new flights so there’s a project that has to improve taxi flow in order to take advantage of growth opportunities there.

Passenger experience:

• Single sign on regardless of which one of American’s three onboard internet providers your flight has is expected to come in the first half of 2019.

• American is not currently working on integration with Google Pay to save boarding passes to mobile devices, “as Google develops the product further we will reevaluate the technology and see how the market and customers adopt it.” (Think forward lead forward in action?)

• Delta won’t put 50 seat regional jets on flights over 750 miles. The planes are a bad customer experience. American was asked by an employee and isn’t interested in that sort of policy.

Business:

• American doesn’t have plans to introduce a mileage-earning prepaid card like United has with Netspend.

• The airline acknowledges that Doug Parker is likely to lose his bet with an analyst that the airline’s stock would hit 60 before the analyst turned 60 in November.

  

  Eventually through inflation alone of course the shares will hit 60…

  

Probably my favorite question was the employee who asked whether management was concerned they would international first class passengers when the airline puts them in a subpar domestic first class product for their connections? And the response was how great international first class is. And that their domestic food is chef-branded (not, crucially, that it’s any good).

My second favorite question was whether American has its strategy wrong since Delta is out-earning American by offering a better product, such as 9-across seating in coach on Boeing 777s versus 10-across at American, while Doug Parker says that customers will pay more to get more? And the answer was that paying more to get more works great because premium economy.