American Airlines Plans To Restart Flights To Australia This Year

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Qantas says it doesn’t plan on restarting services to the United States before July 2021 and Australia is still a country that’s off-limits to most of the world, but that’s not enough to discourage American Airlines. Starting later this year American Airlines plans to resume service between Los Angeles and Sydney and it plans to offer four flights per week.

The last news I saw relating to American’s route between Los Angeles and Sydney was the news that the route restart was postponed to the end of March next year but, despite no official announcement from American Airlines, passenger flights between Los Angeles and Sydney are now bookable on AA.com for travel from 11 November. Here’s what the currently published schedule looks like:

AA73 LAX 22:40 – 09:00+2 days SYD (Tue, Wed, Fri & Sun)
AA72 SYD 11:15 – 06:10 LAX (Tue, Thu, Fri & Sun)

As usual, this route is set to be operated by an American Airlines 777-300ER meaning that this will continue to be one of the few routes on which American Airlines offers an international First Class cabin. Still, as American Airlines First Class is really nothing to get excited about, the better value here is to be found in the Business Class cabin where, although the service may not be particularly notable, the seats are very good indeed.

I’ve had a brief look through the calendar and I can’t find any award availability for either Business Class or First Class. It may be that American hasn’t yet had the opportunity to load award availability into its systems or this may just be American continuing to be miserly with award availability.

One oddity that I noticed is that while upgrade availability (from Economy to Business Class) is virtually non-existent, there is at least one day on which there are plentiful upgrades in both directions:

I’m tempted to think that this is down to someone at American Airlines operating with “fat fingers” but it may also be a sign that the airline hasn’t finished loading all the fare codes correctly – let’s hope it’s the latter!

Bottom Line

American Airlines is set to restart services between Los Angeles and Sydney from 11 November and it will operate the route four times per week. With Australia essentially closed to all but returning residents, it will be interesting to see if this route will survive the Northern Hemisphere winter but, at the very least, it’s nice to see more intercontinental flights reappearing.

[HT: Executive Traveler]