American Airlines is pulling out of its Miami – Tel Aviv route effective March 24, a service they only began in June 2021 and which they expanded two months ago. This news was first broken by aviation watchdog JonNYC.
AA discontinuing MIA-TLV
— 🇺🇦 JonNYC 🇺🇦 (@xJonNYC) January 6, 2023
The move is surprising, because American’s Miami – Tel Aviv flight was only just increased to daily service starting at the end of October. At the same time,
- American had insufficient premium capacity. The flight has been operated by a Boeing 787-8 with just 20 business class seats. I believe only 19 of those have been for sale. While business class has been consistently full, looking out over the next week there are flights with more than 100 empty seats out of 236 total. The original plan for the route, announced two years ago, was three day a week service with a Boeing 777-200.
- And faced competition. American has been competing with El Al’s 5 day a week Boeing 787-9 service which avoids the Sabbath. There’s also more competition for passengers connecting through southern hubs. For instance, Delta has moved forward plans to re-launch Atlanta to Tel Aviv, starting March 26. This is a route they previously served from 2006 – 2011.
According to an American Airlines spokesperson,
As part of the continuous evaluation of our network, American Airlines has made the difficult decision to discontinue its Miami (MIA) – Tel Aviv (TLV) service effective March 24, 2023. We will continue to operate daily service to Tel Aviv from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport (JFK). We’re proactively reaching out to customers affected by these changes to offer alternate travel arrangements.
The airline’s history with Israel is something of a rocky one. American Airlines pulled out of Israel after merging with US Airways. US Airways had flown Philadelphia – Tel Aviv. It was a money-losing route that wasn’t pulled earlier due to the distractions of the merger. However I had expected American to continue and grow there when they dropped El Al as a frequent flyer program partner.
After looking to fly to Tel Aviv again they agreed to Israel’s largest-ever route subsidy to launch Dallas Fort-Worth – Tel Aviv, bringing Christian missionary business from the middle of the country. However they’ve since dropped that plan.
They do, however, still serve Tel Aviv from New York JFK, supported by their relationship with JetBlue, which the federal government sued to stop after first giving the partnership a green light. New York – Tel Aviv is the most crowded Israel market from the U.S. but also the biggest.
Update: Thinking more about ‘what’s different’ since American announced this flight would go daily, worth noting that humanitarian fares, often booked by Christian missionary groups, have been eliminated and with Sheldon Adelson’s passing the Adelson family has eliminated its funding of Birthright. Both could be driving reduced demand for the airline’s flights to Tel Aviv.
Surprising indeed. I just cant see how United manages to keep growing in Israel (flies from EWR, SFO, IAD, ORD and just the other day increased ORD to daily as well), but – AA just keeps cutting back.
AA is doing something wrong in a market where other airlines (not just United) are managing to heavily monetize on.
Israel seems like a bit of an odd market. There seem to be a small number of religious Jews who fly back and forth between the USA and Israel A LOT. And many of them are affluent who want the perks of biz class. There also seem to be a lot of coach tickets sold to Birthright, an organization that gives young American Jews a free trip to Israel. And, obviously, there are tickets sold to tourists, especially Christian groups who want to see the Holy Land. I suspect there are not that many random coach tickets sold to independent leisure travellers (“hey, let’s take a vacation to Israel” is probably not a common thought). So I’m guessing industry connections matter a great deal in this market.
For whatever reason, AA does not seem terribly successful in serving this market. While you would think a Miami flight to Israel would “work” for AA, perhaps there aren’t quite enough Jews in SoFla to compete against El Al. And the advantage of funnelling Latin Americans to Israel through the AA Miami hub isn’t much of an advantage due to the USA difficult visa rules for transiting pax (currently made even more difficult by our crazy Covid vaccine requirement).
Given that this is an ultra-long haul market where the fuel cost per pax is high, it stands to reason that AA’s best strategy could be to just funnel all its pax through NYC with JetBlue’s help, given that this geography works very well and NYC is obviously the home of the most USA Jews.
Maybe this isn’t about a Jewish or Christian demographic, but more about an airline with inferior service and and an adequate amount of premium seats. United with daily double from EWR, and regular service from ORD, SFO, IAD, has never had an issue filling planes and making money on these routes. Even El Al, which has had a historical reputation of poor customer service, has a better hard and soft product with their 787-9 models than American. The MIA-TLV market is prime for a carrier such as UAL or DL to come and service the route on a point-to-point basis. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to fill a 300 seat aircraft 3 or 4 times a week in that market.
The cancellation was already twitted 3 days ago and not by John.
https://twitter.com/ressleroren/status/1610018120080424960?s=46&t=n4bJGtYnVLGlhD-f6kvBQw
@chopsticks – notably birthright’s funding is down 20% this year. with sheldon adelson’s passing, the adelson family has pulled most of its support (this is the $30mm funding gap)
https://birthrightisrael.foundation/blog/after-donor-cuts-birthright-ceo-puts-out-a-challenge-to-the-jewish-community/#:~:text=Its%20organizational%20budget%20will%20fall,from%20%24150%20million%20in%202022.
meanwhile AA has eliminated its flexible missionary fares
@gary leff — that Birthright drop is certainly a material hit to Israel travel. Hard to believe that one organization was sending more than 100 USA travellers to Israel every day. Maybe now is not the best time to be adding seats to Israel! We know that AA management is very focused on cutting unprofitable routes. I can easily believe that, with all the new service the past few years and the higher fuel expense, Israel is not a very profitable market right now.
I think this speaks more about AA management’s ability to run an airline than it does about the route. UA has created an absolute franchise between the US/Israel despite that it’s flying from a generally inferior EWR hub as compared to JFK and a generally inferior hard product. Delta also seems to also be doing pretty well in this market. Why is it that AA can only fill a single plane a day on a route that works so well at other carriers?
As previous article American Airlines is reluctant to research international market and order B788 or -9 instead of -10. This the yield management and the director of routing structure.
@Robert, neither DL nor UA will ever likely launch a MIA-TLV route.
AA went from 3-4 weekly on a 77E to daily on a 787-8 and that was a sign of trouble, not optimism, when AA touted the route was performing so well, it wanted to make it daily. The 77E is a more premium heavy plane than the 787-8, which AA relegates often to “leisure” markets, though not always, for its long haul network. That signals it wasn’t selling business class seats as much and the other issue, which seems to hobble AA’s international network, is probably a weak point of sale originating on the TLV event.
The MIA market to Israel is probably not big enough to support 2 airlines.
DL makes TLV work because it has good yields and feed on the JFK end, and strong feed on the ATL end. BOS presumably has good yields and biotech.
UA has invested in TLV for years, inheriting the original 2 x daily CO service from EWR through the merger and keeps growing it with feed from hubs that generate likely better yield than MIA can, for all the hubris around Miami being the new nirvana of America.
It’s called surrendering the market to Scott Kirby.
American is a dying airline. Why do people on this blog not understand that?
Can you please answer my question i posted on how to traverse between international and domestic at Atlanta Hartsfield? I posted on 11.22.22 story dated around the same date. Thx Here is my post:
Jeffrey Bilus November 22, 2022
I am flying to Israel via Boston with Delta. I do not want to park at International Parking due to the prohibited cost (Peachy Parking). They do offer an early bird special of 99 dollars for domestic only. My question is can I use Peachy Parking’s domestic parking be driven to Delta’s domestic terminal? Check my bags at Delta’s domestic terminal through to Tel Avis via Boston (domestic). That would save a ton of money.
We are flying back from Tel Avis to Charles De Gaulle to Atlanta. So, we will land at Atlanta’s International and receive our bags at International. From International can we take a shuttle to Atlanta’s domestic area and then take Peachy Parking from Delta’s domestic terminal to our car which will be parked in PP’s domestic parking lot? Thank in advance
It’s a tough destination. I feel like the airlines need to fly from Jewish demographic cities like NYC to make it work. They also need good contracts with tour groups to fill the coach seats. Most American’s go there for religious tours and are generally afraid to visit without a group. I take small groups 6-8 people there to avoid the big bus tours and it is surprising how afraid the average person is to do independent travel there. With AA changing the plans all the time and no long-established routes AND poor award ticket options it makes sense that they lack market share and fail to build that up on routes over time.
Wow! That is bad news for me. I loved that TLV-MIA nonstop.
That will stop competition for ElAl.
The only good thing is my flights on AA are before they are pulling out.
I spoke with American airlines agents today who had no knowledge or the discontinued non stop from MIA to TVL. They were prepared to sell me a business class ticket for May 3rd. I told agent and her supervisor that they should take down the flight availability immediately,
There’s a very astute comment on FT, observing that the route took 2 aircraft to fly given the distances involved. Perhaps AA has identified 2 lucrative, unsaturated TA city-pairs where they can deploy the aircraft.