There’s no arguing that American’s single strongest international market is Latin America. While American is doing their best to catch up with the other legacies in Asia and Europe, they have a clear advantage in Latin America.
Heck, they fly to 10 destinations in Brazil. If I’m being perfectly honest, I can’t even name 10 cities in Brazil.
On approach into Sao Paulo, Brazil
While American seems to be able to make just about any route to Latin America work, I was a bit surprised when they announced they would launch new flights to Viracopos, Brazil, as of December 2014.
This included daily service between Miami and Viracopos, as well as 3x weekly service between New York and Viracopos. That Airport is about 50 miles from the Sao Paulo Airport, though admittedly with traffic there’s quite a bit of distance between the two airports.
Anyway, I guess I wasn’t crazy in wondering whether that really had the potential to be a lucrative route, as American is already discontinuing the 3x weekly New York to Viracopos route as of March 29, 2015.
As of now they’re still keeping the route between Miami and Viracopos, which I’m guessing they can make work, since they can just route all passengers through Miami.
While seatmaps are never a 100% accurate indicator of how a flight is doing, the seatmaps between New York and Viracopos are empty. Looking at the flight over the coming weeks, I don’t see a single flight with more than 50 seats occupied on the seatmap, between both business class and economy class.
Bottom line
It seems like American launched this Viracopos service simply to compete with Azul’s new routes to the US, not wanting to lose too much Sao Paulo-area market share to another airline.
I can’t blame them for discontinuing the route, and I’ll be curious to see if the Miami route sticks around as well.
Do you think the Miami to Viracopos route will stick around, or was this new service just a hasty response to Azul?
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