American Airlines “Permanently” Cancels Doha Flights, After Four Years

While this service has been suspended for several months due to the Iran conflict, it now looks like this is no longer a suspension, but a cancellation.

American won’t resume its Philadelphia to Doha route

American Airlines no longer plans to resume its flight between Philadelphia (PHL) and Doha (DOH), so this route has now been been “permanently” cut (well, at least as much as anything in the airline industry is “permanent”). This has been confirmed by the carrier’s SVP of Network Planning, Brian Znotins.

Until recently, American had pulled inventory for the route through January 2027. But this flight has now been fully pulled from the schedule, so there are no plans for it to resume.

For some background on this, American first began flying to Doha in June 2022, out of New York (JFK), as part of a strategic partnership with Qatar Airways, which went beyond the two airlines simply both belonging to the oneworld alliance.

That particularly route didn’t last long, and as of October 2023, American shifted its Doha route from New York to Philadelphia. This seemed to be a coordinated effort with Qatar Airways, and essentially involved a route swap — at the same time, Qatar Airways cut its flight to Philadelphia, and added an additional daily frequency to New York.

It’s not surprising to see American now cut this service, because we also just learned that Qatar Airways plans to resume this route, replacing American in Philadelphia.

With this development, American’s only long haul routes out of Philadelphia are to Europe, as this was the carrier’s longest route at the airport, and also the only long haul flight to the Middle East.

My take on American ending Doha flights

I guess there are a few ways to go about analyzing American’s decision to end flights to Doha.

It goes without saying that the current conflict in the Middle East has complicated things for the aviation sector, as it’s anyone’s guess when global airlines can reliably resume service to the region, without concern over shutdowns due to Iranian missiles.

Reliability is important for airlines, since aircraft are expensive assets, and they can’t just efficiently be reassigned at the last minute to another route, at least in terms of creating demand so quickly in other markets. So if you can’t consistently operate a route, there’s a lot of risk associated with that.

Then there’s the whole issue with long haul flight profitability being much more challenging with current jet fuel prices, as we don’t know when that situation will improve.

Bigger picture, though, American’s service to Doha never made all that much sense to me, at least in the long run, and in the context of American’s long haul strategy:

• Qatar has been offering massive incentives for foreign airlines to fly to Doha, so I imagine that was a motivating factor in American launching service to Doha, and perhaps those are only valid for so long
• I of course understand that this was kind of intended as a route that feeds people into Qatar Airways’ network, whether they’re going somewhere in the Middle East, India, Africa, etc.
• The issue was, it’s not clear why someone would fly American over Qatar Airways; Qatar Airways has a much better passenger experience, and a massively lower cost structure
• American doesn’t care a whole lot about being a global airline in the first place, so it’s not like United, where having a huge global route network is of importance, and is part of the value proposition for being loyal to the airline

American is said to have plans to launch a new long haul route with the plane being freed up by this service, so let’s see what that ends up being…

Bottom line

American Airlines has decided to end its Doha service, which has most recently been operated out of Philadelphia, and before that, out of New York. The service has now been suspended for several months due to the Iran conflict, but at this point the airline has decided to just permanently cut the route, roughly four years after it was first launched.

While American and Qatar Airways have a strategic partnership, American actually flying to Doha was of limited value, given that Qatar Airways has a better passenger experience and a lower cost structure. Qatar Airways now plans to launch this route in American’s place. I’m curious to see which route American decides to launch in place of this.

What do you make of American ending Doha flights?