Following a year in which its operational reliability paled in comparison with its U.S. competitors, American Airlines is promising improvement.
"We didn't perform as well as we'd like in 2018," company president Robert Isom said during American's quarterly earnings call Thursday. "We expect to reverse that very quickly."
American's 2018 results on measures such as on-time performance, cancellation rate, mishandled baggage and tarmac delays earned the carrier seventh place out of eight airlines ranked by the Wall Street Journal in its annual Middle Seat Scorecard last week. The paper ranked only ultralow-cost carrier Frontier lower.
American has historically fared poorly in the Journal's scorecard, but the carrier nevertheless saw its number drop in five of seven categories between 2017 and 2018.
American's operations hit a low over the summer. In June, its cancellation rate rose to above 4%, and in July only 75.1% of American flights arrived on time, according to the website FlightStats, which is part of the Flight Global network. (The DOT defines on time as flights arriving within 15 minutes of schedule.) The lows in part mirrored industry trends during the busy summer travel season. Still, American's on-time and cancellation performance lagged behind its largest U.S. competitors, Delta, United and Southwest.
Isom said Thursday that in recent months American has been fine-tuning its network-planning process and also putting a greater emphasis on the proper staging of aircraft in the morning in order to improve reliability. From an on-time standpoint, those efforts appear to be yielding results. In December, American was on time 80.64% of the time, according to FlightStats, and in November its on-time rate was 81.89%. Both of those figures were better than the average for mainline North American carriers.
However, American continues to trail competitors in terms of cancellations. In December, it canceled 3.3% of flights, worst among mainline North American airlines.
Isom said that reliability is a top-of-mind American goal for this year.
His remarks came as the airline reported net pretax income in the fourth quarter of $387 million, down 5.2% year-over-year. American's full-year 2018 pretax income was $1.88 billion, down 44.5% from 2017.
American reported fourth quarter revenues of $10.94 billion, up 3.1% year-over-year and in line with analyst expectation. The carrier's full-year 2018 revenues were $44.54 billion, up 4.5% from 2017.
Those increases were countered by a 4.2% year-over-year jump in fourth quarter expenses and a 9.1% jump in full year expenses during 2018. The higher cost line was due primarily to fuel expenses, which were up 18.6% in the fourth quarter and 31.4% for the year.
American said Thursday that it plans to increase capacity by 3% in 2019, with most of the growth coming at its largest hub, Dallas/Fort Worth, where it will open 15 new gates.