Flying out of Charlotte? There’s still time to grab these perks on wide-body planes
American Airlines passengers still have time to catch a flight on a wide-body plane — with perks like lie-flat seats in business class — on some domestic routes out of Charlotte Douglas International Airport.
The airline, the dominant air carrier at CLT, is operating two domestic routes and one international route with wide-body planes out of the airport: flights to Miami, Honolulu and London.
The wide-body flights are operated on Boeing 777-200 planes, with between 276 and 364 seats.
Smaller narrow-body planes have just one aisle, but the wide-body flights have two aisles, featuring more room for those additional seats.
And the lie-flat seats in business class feature up to 6-feet-6-inches of sleeping space.
The wide-body planes had often been reserved for long-haul international flights before the pandemic — like the flight between CLT and London.
But during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, “there just wasn’t demand for flying across the ocean,” American’s Managing Director of Global Network Planning Jason Reisinger told the Observer recently.
Business travel substantially declined. So as destinations like Hawaii opened back up and Florida remained open to travelers, American shifted its plans away from business travel.
“We were happy to try to chase the leisure traffic,” Reisinger said.
American’s plans for Miami, Honolulu
American Airlines began operating flights to Hawaii from CLT in May. The Honolulu flight will run through Jan. 3, 2022, according to American.
The wide-body plane is appropriate for the Honolulu route, the longest flight operating from Charlotte’s airport at about 10 hours, according to American.
Adding wide-body planes to the Miami route was a bigger change.
The Miami flight connects Charlotte passengers to American’s Miami hub, with routes to Latin America and the Caribbean, Reisinger said. That route from Charlotte is scheduled to run through early to mid-fall, he said.
There are no plans to discontinue wide-body flights to London. The London flights were stopped during the height of the pandemic, and resumed in late October.
Adding other routes from Charlotte
Adding wide-body planes to the Miami route is just one way the airline worked to bring vacationers back to air travel this summer.
In another effort to attract leisure travel, American added 17 new summer routes from Charlotte Douglas this year, with a focus on beach, mountain and park destinations, according to the airline.
Those destinations include Jackson Hole Airport in Wyoming, Reno-Tahoe International Airport in Nevada, Martha’s Vineyard Airport in Massachusetts and two Mexican destinations: Puerto Vallarta International Airport and Cozumel International Airport.
The airline has also expanded service to some existing destinations over the summer, including additional flights to to Bermuda; San Jose del Cabo in Mexico; Las Vegas, Nevada; Nashville, Tennessee; Cancun, Mexico, and Panama City, Florida.
As students go back to school in the fall, American expects leisure travel to slow, Reisinger said. And the airline is expecting to see business travel pick up.
“We’ve started to see business travel start to come back — continual slow, slow ramp up there,” Reisinger said.
Airport traffic in Charlotte
Charlotte’s airport saw passenger traffic take a deep dive early in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic hit North Carolina.
The number of local fliers who began their trips at CLT fell about 58%, from 7.7 million in 2019 to 3.2 million in 2020, according to the airport’s 2020 report, released Friday.
In June, the most recent month of passenger data available, more than 2.1 million people boarded planes at Charlotte’s airport — a big increase from 783,600 people in June 2020, according to CLT numbers.
And May 2020 marked the first time the airport reported more than 2 million passengers boarding planes in a single month since January 2020.
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