BREAKING: American Airlines Adds Five New International Routes

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Rumors of new American Airlines international routes have been circulating for some time and we’ve been hearing some very plausible guesses as to where American may next send its aircraft and few crazy guesses too…but the time for guessing is now over.

American Airlines has just announced that it will be launching 5 new international routes in 2020 with a strong focus on what was once known as “Eastern Europe”, its first flight to Africa and a route that’s going to please a significant number of people.

American Airlines New Routes For 2020

• Philadelphia (PHL) to Casablanca, Morocco (CMN)
• Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) to Tel Aviv, Israel (TLV)
• Chicago (ORD) to Krakow, Poland (KRK)
• Chicago (ORD) to Budapest, Hungary (BUD)
• Chicago (ORD) to Prague, Czech Republic (PRG)

Yes, American Airlines is finally making a long-awaited return to Tel Aviv (I guess United is making too much on its route to Tel Aviv to ignore!) and it will be linking Philadelphia to Morocco in what appears to be the first step in linking up with Royal Air Maroc which is soon to be a fully-integrated member of the oneworld alliance.

The routes to Casablanca, Krakow, Prague, and Budapest are set to be seasonal (summer season) while the route to Tel Aviv is set to operate year-round.

American Airlines has confirmed that the service between Philadelphia and Casablanca will be operated by a Boeing 757 while the three seasonal routes to Krakow, Prague, and Budapest will be served by the airline’s 787-8 Dreamliner offering 20 Business Class seats, 28 Premium Economy seats, 48 Main Cabin Extra seats and138 regular Economy Class seats.

The new route to Tel Aviv will be operated by American’s Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner so, although there will be no First Class option on this route, the Business Class cabin will be a reasonable size (30 seats).

At the time of writing, none of these routes have been loaded into the schedules but we shouldn’t have long to wait to see what the departure/arrival times will look like – all the seasonal routes will go on sale from 12 August 2019 but we’ll have to wait a little longer for the airline to open up sales on its new route to Tel Aviv (10 October 2019).

Bottom Line

I suspect that it will be American’s resumption of service to Israel which will get the most attention here but it’s also good to see the airline offering more services deep into Europe (and not relying on British Airways to connect on passengers in London).

Personally, I’m most excited about the new route to Krakow as it’s a city I genuinely love (but haven’t visited in years), but Budapest and Prague will also be fantastic options for travelers based in Chicago (or those happy to connect).

Still, here’s one word of caution before we all get a little too excited at our new options: These routes are only scheduled for 2020 and, if they don’t perform well (a number of American’s other European summer routes are reported to have been big failures this year), they’ll be going away as quickly as they arrived – if you’d like to fly with American Airlines to any of these cities I strongly suggest you book for 2020 as you can’t be sure the routes will still be around in 2021.

Which of these routes are you happiest to see announced?