American Airlines will be ‘relentless’ in winning back business travelers. Here’s how

American Airlines (AAL-0.51%) reported earnings Thursday; it posted a $149 million loss on $13.7 billion in revenue. But the company also gave an update on its quest to win back the road-warrior customers whose departure has been a huge loss for the firm.

The company said it actually had $205 million in positive net income excluding charges for a new flight attendant union contract among other things, and it called out challenges posed by the CrowdStrike outage and a pair of hurricanes. But a big focus has been regaining business from business-class travelers.

“American’s corporate and agency flown revenue share bottomed at 11% below our historical share,” CEO Robert Isom said on the airline’s earnings call.

Earlier this year, American fired its former chief commercial officer, Vasu Raja. He had been attempting to bring more business-class revenue directly to the company instead of routing it through corporate travel agencies. One method was by making it harder for passengers to earn loyalty points if they booked indirectly. A Bain report suggested this alienated too many of those customers to be tenable, and now American is trying to make up for lost ground.

To that end, the carrier is trying to atone by amending its biggest corporate customers’ travel contracts, signing new agreements with business travel agencies, and earlier this month relaunching its Corporate Experience program designed to give corporate flyers priority for seats and rebookings in the case of flight disruptions. Isom said that in third quarter American had clawed its way back to 7% below its business travel business levels.

“We know full restoration of our revenue will take some time. But with the progress we’re seeing and the actions underway, we aim to fully restore our revenue from indirect channels as we exit 2025,” Isom said on the call. “We will continue our relentless focus on reestablishing relationships with our business customers, re-embracing the agency channel, and making it easier to do business with American.”