American Airlines Customer EngagementDuring the Jan. 29 American Airlines fiscal fourth quarter conference call, CEO Doug Parker was amazed at the strides the company has made in the past year from a customer engagement/customer loyalty perspective.

For the fourth quarter, American Airlines earned a record net profit of $1.3 billion, benefiting from a better than 40% drop in its fuel bill from the same period last year.

“It’s hard to imagine just two years ago this American Airlines was emerging from bankruptcy,” Parker said, according to Seeking Alpha. “A new record of $1.3 billion American Airlines Customer Engagementexceeded last year’s $1.1 billion. This is all the result of incredibly hard work and great work by 100,000 employees who are just doing a phenomenal job at taking care of customers, while we work through an integration. It was just a year ago … the big concern was how much disruption this airline might put upon its customers as we worked through integration.”

But, since then, and after the stellar fourth-quarter performance, Parker stated: “Our team hit the ball out of the park.”

Parker noted several key accomplishments by his team, including: Frequent flyer integration, single operating certificate, and reservation system migration.

“All of those things done flawlessly and again great credit to a really phenomenal team that is doing a great job,” Parker added. “We still have a lot to do. We’re well aware of that. But, we are well on our way to restoring American as the greatest airline in the world. We’re extremely proud on the results.”

Derek Kerr, American Airlines’ CFO, said that the airline continued its fleet renewal program by investing more than $5.3 billion in new aircraft, providing the company with the youngest and most modern fleet of the U.S. network airlines.

In 2015, the company took delivery of 75 new mainline aircraft while retiring 112 aircraft. What’s more, the company added 52 regional aircraft to its fleet while it removed 31 regional aircraft.

“This program will continue in 2016 when we take delivery of 55 new mainline aircraft, while adding 49 regional aircraft,” Kerr explained. “We expect to remove 92 mainline aircraft and 29 regional aircraft from our fleet in 2016. With these new deliveries, our mainline average age will drop below 10 years, further widening the age gap between American and our network peers.”

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