Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. This is Bernstein's fourth annual Industrials Insights Forum. We appreciate you having us here this morning. We also appreciate American Airlines, Robert Isom, Devon May, CFO, Nate Kliethermes, and the team are here with us to go through a bit of a fireside chat. We're going to start off with a couple of prepared remarks, and then we will dig right into the Q&A. So first of all, thank you guys very much for coming out. Appreciate you joining us for the event. Why don't you go ahead and take us out?
Thanks, David. Good morning, everybody. It's great to be here. I love the opportunity to talk about American. There's a lot going on. It's been an eventful year, as I think everybody knows. But I'm really pleased, no matter what was thrown at us this year, American and our team really did a great job of managing through. And while we were focused on dealing with issues at the time, I can tell you that we never stopped building the foundation for the future. So as I take a look at everything that we've done in 2025, look, we did an exceptional job. Started the year with Flight 5302, and we kind of ended the year with the government shutdown. But in between all of that, the hard work, look, we have labor contracts in place.
We have cost certainty with our frontline team members all the way out through 2027, 2028. First time in my career that I've had the benefit of not having big labor contract issues staring us straight in the face. Our balance sheet, we've done tremendous work. Despite all the issues that have happened this year, we have been able to continue to pull debt down. Going back to the height of the pandemic and $54 billion total debt, and now we hit our first target of getting below $37 billion, and we're on our way to $35, which is, I think, remarkable in this type of environment. On top of that, I just love what we have from a fleet perspective. Boeing and Airbus finally started to deliver. Taking our 787-9s, 737s are coming off the line now. We've been hampered for a number of years.
And don't forget, it was just a year ago that we had finally gotten our regional fleet fully back restored. At one time, we had over 250 aircraft that we couldn't fly right after the pandemic. So it feels great that we're finally able to deploy equipment. And everything that's not being delivered new, we've got so many different modification programs going on, refreshment of the fleet. I'm just super excited about it. And, David, at a conference not too long ago, we talked about missteps in sales and distribution. Right? Super pleased with the team, the organization we put together. As we exit this year, we're going to be recovered from where we were before the sales and distribution missteps. Can't wait to get the run rate benefit of that as we take a look into 2026.
So that hard work against a backdrop of a really tough year, I've got incredible excitement about what comes next. Because that next is really where I think we can really start putting some points on the board. So I start with the Citi deal and everything that we're doing from a loyalty perspective with our AAdvantage program . While it's taken some time to negotiate that deal, and we've announced it a while back, January 2026 is when it starts. And I feel great that we're on track to produce the results that we've talked a lot about. Having that fleet in place, having the labor contracts in place, it puts us in a position as well to really get back to tending to our network.
As we take a look at this coming year, that network is already in great shape, and we've done some growth in Chicago and Philadelphia. But that's going to be augmented as we look into the new year in places like Miami and Phoenix. And it's not building a lot of new gates, okay? It's taking AAdvantage of infrastructure that we already have in place. So feel great about that. With all the new products, we have opportunities to merchandise that and take AAdvantage of technology investments that we've been making along the way. And then I'll put a wrapper around that. American, we are a premium global airline. We have the best network of anyone in the most lucrative travel market in the U.S. But we're going to put that to work even better as we continue to pay down from a customer experience perspective.
We announced earlier this year a new organization that's centrally located and focused on delivering, and there seems to be an announcement that we'll make on every day, whether it's flagship lounges or Admirals Clubs, free Wi-Fi, AT&T partnerships. Super excited about what's coming from that perspective, and I think it's a value multiplier on all the other initiatives. Underlying all of that, there is no one that produces capacity more efficiently, and we're not going to lose that trait, so as we look forward, super excited about 2026. We'll start out 2025 with a lot of optimism. We looked into the fourth quarter with a lot of optimism, and I have great confidence that the consumer wants to fund, and we're going to have a product that they're going to want to buy.
All right. So I definitely want to dig into a lot of that, a lot of the issues that you've brought up in terms of kind of what's next. But maybe if we were to start and think about the government shutdown, framing what that impact is kind of near term. One of your peers had called out maybe a $200 million sort of pre-tax profit headwind from the government shutdown. Can you give us a sense for how to think about the right way to assess the impact on American's performance in the fourth quarter from?
Our third quarter earnings wasn't it? It seems like it's years ago, but it hasn't been that long ago. What we said at the time is that in the early stages of the government shutdown, that we were impacted by less than $1 million a day. As we took a look into October, things were going fairly well. What we saw, as everybody else in the industry did, there was tremendous disruption and a lot of book away, not book away, but a lot of customers that weren't booking that impacted the later stages, November, and especially when we got into the period of actually having imposed reductions in schedule. We've got a big operation. We've got government traffic. We've got a DCA exposure as well. We're still sizing that all up. It's a sizable impact.
What I will tell you is that we're very pleased as we've gotten through the shutdown and restoring our network. We're very pleased with the rebound in bookings as we take a look out into 2026, and what we see as we go out into 2026 is that we're exactly on track to where we had thought we'd be, so we're doing more assessing in terms of the government shutdown. We'll have more to talk about as we get into full year earnings and we talk in January.
Devon, anything else you want to add?
No.
Okay. So as you think about maybe I know it's early to talk about plans and stuff like that, but you think about the growth aspirations you have for the network, kind of looking forward. Obviously, some of that's kind of demand-oriented. But if you think about where we are in the economy and nothing changes, what's the right kind of range of ASM growth to be thinking about for the next couple of years?
I'll start with just the fleet. We're in this great spot right now with where we're at through all the work we did in the teens when we did a massive fleet renewal program. We're now at this point where we have no required retirements because our average fleet age is so young, and we just don't have any aircraft that are at that higher age end of the spectrum. Through this decade, we don't have any required retirements, which means every delivery we have, we are able to grow with them. With $3billion-$3.5 billion of aircraft CapEx a year, we can grow the airline by somewhere around 5% each year. Some years it'll be a little over 5%, some years a little less. On average, with the fleet we have coming in, we can grow up to 5%.
But that's going to be dependent on a bunch of things. It's going to be dependent on the competitive environment we're in, demand, demand for our product specifically. We've got a lot of flexibility with how we're going to end up growing the airline, but that's kind of what we're able to do. We can grow at it five% or more if we choose to do so. We can grow more in line with wherever demand ends up if it is something less than that. So we love the flexibility we have with the fleet today. In terms of the network, as Robert talked about earlier, this year was a big year of growth for Chicago. We're pleased with what's happened there. A lot of growth in Philadelphia, which has done exceptionally well for us. We look out to 2026. We have growth opportunities across the hubs.
It's just when it comes in. But in 2026, we feel it's a good year for growth for Miami and Phoenix, as Robert mentioned. We think over the long term, all of our hubs have good growth opportunities, just somewhat dependent on facilities and some timing.
And just to be clear, as far as kind of that being able to grow 5%, you're still going to be more monitoring around what the market's going to absorb as opposed to saying, "Hey, we're going to grow 5%.
It was with the bookends. You know what we've done in the past. We're pretty flexible with capacity. When we see different demand trends, we're able to act pretty quickly to it. We saw it in 2024 where the industry got oversupplied in the first half of the year. American was pretty quick to adjust to that and pulled down capacity pretty meaningfully in the back half of the year. This year, we had all the economic uncertainty and a bit of a demand shock in the first half of the year, and same type of thing. We're able to get some capacity out in the back half of the third quarter. We feel we've right-sized our fourth quarter operation for recent demand trends, so our bookends, yeah, we can do 5% or 6% if we want to with the fleet we have.
We'll be very mindful of economic growth and demand specifically for our product.
Okay. And then within the footprint, you mentioned sort of Philadelphia, Miami, some of the hubs. Is that really where the growth is going to be centered, or is it going to be also in more battleground areas like LA, Chicago?
We've done a great job early on in making sure that DFW and Charlotte are fully utilized. And we had some fleet constraints, but as Devon's mentioned, as I said earlier, those have eased up and we have the opportunity. So Chicago is obviously a battleground. And the growth we have planned going from 485 departures to over 500 in 2026, we're just getting back to where we were prior to the pandemic. And the same actually holds true in places like Phoenix and Philadelphia as well. Miami, we'll see sizable growth as well. But that's a place that, look, we do very, very well and have great confidence that that capacity is going to be profitably deployed. The network in all respects is in really good shape.
And I like the fact that a lot of the growth that we anticipate is really just putting some of our hubs back to size as they were.
Okay. And then as you think about that framework of bookends of growth, Devon, in 0%-5% for ASMs, what's a range of CASM-ex that folks should be thinking about, given that we have some certainty on the labor cost side? Can you help us as analysts kind of think about at the low end, it'd be here, at the high end, it'd be here?
Yeah. I got asked that question last week as well. And we seem to get that a lot from different investors. But at that higher end, so if we did end up growing around 5%, it's hard to get a rule of thumb that works for every airline. Because to Robert's point earlier, not every airline has certainty around labor costs. So some airlines are going to be faced with more cost pressures on that side of things. Overall, I think we just do an exceptional job in terms of how we deliver capacity. We did a nice job just managing costs, I'll say, for 8 or 10 years after the merger. Since coming out of COVID, we started a program that we call re-engineering the business, which is really just trying to drive efficiencies throughout the business by investing in technology, by improving processes.
We thought there was $1 billion of opportunity there. So far, we've achieved about $750 million. We think there's more to come. Over the long term, I think we can drive more and more efficiencies with further technology investment. But back to your question on 5% growth, I think for American, I think it is fair to say at mid-single digit capacity, we should have low single digit unit cost production. If capacity comes down a little bit, I think you'd expect a little higher unit cost pressure. If capacity goes up a little bit from that point, you should perform a little better as this CASM-ex fuel ex profit sharing . But overall, I think we do a fantastic job just driving efficiency. It's something that's a mindset across our business.
We've talked a lot about everything we've done in terms of how we invest in every bit of salary and benefit line. We are looking at it from the day we hire to how we bring people on to how they're trained, manpower planning, modeling. Day of a regular operation, what are the right tools so we can drive more efficiency so it ends up being better for our team members, better for our customers? On that line, I think we do just a fantastic job. You've seen we've grown the airline by 5% or 6% over the past couple of years. We've grown headcount by 1%. I think you should expect to see that trend continue where our capacity growth is going to borrow us through our headcount growth.
Okay, and is there a little bit of gauge benefit in there as well with the new aircraft coming in? How do I think about that?
If you look at our order book right now, all the narrowbodies are coming into higher end of gauge. So we're going to take, on the Airbus side, nothing but A321s. So we'll take both the Neos at 190 some seats. We'll have the XLRs that are coming in closer to 150 seats. But generally speaking, it's the largest gauge in the narrowbodies. This year has kind of been an interesting year. We'll take our last 15 or so, MAX 8. We'll have a break from Boeing narrowbodies in 2027 before we start taking delivery of the MAX 10. So all of our deliveries from 2028 and beyond on the Boeing side for narrow bodies are going to be the largest gauge there as well. So we will continue to see some gauge benefit over time.
We're not retiring anything, so it won't be as extreme as it's been in some years, but we will continue to get some gauge benefit.
Okay. So maybe kind of stepping back and looking at the industry, one of the things that I've seen that's been fascinating in the call it 10 years now I've been covering the airlines. You're seeing a real bifurcation, I think, in the industry. It's moving away from a commodity sort of industry where low cost, low price wins to something more where airlines are trying to really engage on the premium product side. I wanted to ask you, Robert, where do you view your positioning in the industry today? Right? As far as kind of you mentioned before, you're a premium airline. There are other airlines that are also premium airlines that maybe have a little bit of a different margin profile. How do you view kind of where you are?
What's working and what could be better in your sort of assessment of where America is today on that drive to really kind of harvest the premium part of this market?
Right. So it's been a great dynamic. And fortunately, from a premium perspective, this isn't something that is new to American. American, way back, developed loyalty programs. The AAdvantage program is the largest among any carrier, and we offer the most value to customers just about in every metric. We're the first airline to put in place lounges. And we're currently the carrier that has the most of what you would consider ultra premium lounges among the network carriers. We've always had great product in business class, and when we've had first class, same thing. So American's roots are in serving the premium customer. But as we go forward, it's more than just a business product.
The great thing that we see now is that, sure, the business travelers, the road warriors want all the premium services, but we see a great mix of more leisure customers that want to buy up into that cabin, and we've got to take AAdvantage of that dynamic, and we are, so when you take a look at, start with fleet, we put bets down years ago to be ready for this dynamic that's happening right now, so you'll see our lie-flat seat growth, okay, for the real international long-haul grow by 50% over the next few years. Our premium seats are growing by 30% over the next few years, so we're ready for this dynamic. We're making huge investments in terms of lounges. The relationship with Citi is going to further spur demand for that.
And if you take a look at what we're doing from a customer experience perspective, we're making sure that we have all the in-flight amenities that are ready to go as well. And again, when you have the fleet, when you have the ground facilities, when you have your people ready to serve in a fashion, you can take AAdvantage of a new champagne offering, a new coffee offering, new amenities in terms of mattress pads and pajamas on flights. So I like where we're at because I believe a lot of this is upside. And when you take a look at something like our Flagship Suite, which I just flew coming back from London over the weekend, we're absolutely positively at the top. I'll put that product up against anybody that wants to come.
Our effort right now is making sure that we get out there and we deliver. All the pieces are in place, and that's the exciting opportunity for 2026. We're not a carrier that's out there talking about free Wi-Fi, and we don't have satellite Wi-Fi installed on aircraft. We will have satellite Wi-Fi on all of our plus 50-seat regional jets and every other aircraft that we have. We're not a carrier that's talking about new aircraft that are delivering three, four years from now. We've got our A321XLRs. There's going to be an event tomorrow that you'll see us kicking off on that. We've got our Flagship Suites that are being put on those new deliveries or on the retrofits that we've got. I like where we're at.
And at the same time, David, we also have to understand that we have a full range of product that we have to offer, and we've got to appeal to the budget-minded customer as well. And from that perspective, the effort is really making sure that the travel is seamless and that there are no problems. And so there's a tremendous investment that we're making right now on making sure that when things do go awry from a travel perspective, that we make sure our customer is taken care of before they have to think about it. And that's where the investment is going right now. So from an overall financial picture, right, love what we see. Premium traffic is now 50% of our revenues and growing. Love what's happening there. We're going to take care of the budget-minded customer as well.
Another thing that I just throw out is, in the last few years, there's been a little bit more margin in international travel than there has been domestic. Fortunately, we're in a position now where we can actually start playing a little bit bigger game in that international side of the market as well. Now, that said, domestically, I think that there is tremendous opportunity for improvement. That's where supply and demand, I think, is coming back into more imbalance. And right now, I think American is going to be the winner in that category when things really shake out.
I mean, there's a perception, I think, among some investors that maybe you're not as well positioned in that premium side, and that maybe explains some of the margin gap relative to your peers. Do you think that's accurate, not accurate? What is the investment community missing when we're?
Oh, I think it's something that we have to work on. Because that story of product that we have that I know is competitive on every level and the investments that we're making, we're going to do a better job of making sure that that's packaged, that the investor community knows about it, but more importantly, that our customer feels all the benefits of that. Again, I'll just start with, I have great confidence in the underpinnings of our loyalty program already being the largest and also, I think, perceived as the most valuable. That's a great hook into anything we want to deliver because getting our message out to customers is not hard. We've got a huge base out there that are going to be really excited about the offerings that we have.
Okay. And then as you think about the hard product side of it, obviously, a number of years ago with the Oasis layout, you guys moved away from seatback entertainment, right? Is that something that you're going to go back and now try to change, or do you feel like that's the right product to be putting out in the market? One of the examples that gets brought up to me is, well, American's not necessarily there. They don't have the same kind of seatback entertainment. I'm trying to get a sense for kind of how you view this stuff so that.
We're going to put seatback entertainment where it counts, and I'd start with this is that seatback entertainment is table stakes for flying internationally, and whether it's the A321s, the A321XLRs, or any of our widebody aircraft, we're going to make sure that we have the best in the business, and where we don't, we're going to make sure that we have the best in terms of connectivity and the offerings for in-flight entertainment for people to use on their own devices. That's something that we constantly monitor, and if we ever get to a point where we think that that's something that would drive a lot of value, we'd rethink it, but where we're at right now, I like what we've got coming on under deliveries, and I like what we've got in our fleet right now.
Okay. So you did mention earlier that you've started a kind of a customer experience initiative, right? And obviously, you've got a new head of commercial who's joined us today. When you think about the priorities you're setting for the team in going after this premium margin opportunity, right, what are the kind of KPIs you're setting out there for them in terms of whether it's closing an experience gap, whether it's the surveys that come out from various third parties? Help us understand kind of what's success for those teams?
I'll just start with two simple things. We look at this in every respect, every level, every segmentation. I'll just start with this. It's about producing more revenue, and it's about delivering to our customers a better experience, one that they will say that is worth the extra revenue. The kind of things that I take a look at are unit revenues and NPS scores. We want to see that what we're delivering is really meeting the needs of our customers. Break that down further. I can take you through all the pain points. I'll tell you right off, what customers want is a reliable service. They want a clean aircraft. They want bags delivered on time, and they want to show up on time.
And when they don't, and this is where we have a huge opportunity to use technology, when they don't, they want to make sure that they know that they're taken care of. They're taken care of in a way that puts them back on time, values their time, and potentially even compensates them for any type of disruption. So a tremendous amount of work there. But then it's things like connectivity. Do you have Wi-Fi that works? Do you have a food product offering? And when you get into the premium type services, do you have a business class seat that is up to par? And on all those fronts where we're not already in the game with something that is what I would consider favorable, we're going to be there in a very short period of time.
Okay. And maybe as you think about the margin gap on some of these premium experiences, right, you mentioned lie-flat is going to be 50% growth, premium international premium economy is going to be 30% growth. Can you give us a sense for kind of the relative margin profiles of those premium products?
I don't think we'll give that detail. I will say.
I know it's higher.
Sorry?
I know it's higher.
It's higher.
That's not helpful to me.
It's something that we measure on flights every single day. We look at cabin profitability for every flight that we offer, and it's widebodies and narrowbodies. And what we see across the board is, yes, our premium cabins have higher profitability right now than our main cabin. That's different than it was for us in the industry a decade or so ago, but to Robert's point, that's why we started planning differently five, six, seven, eight years ago for what this fleet is going to look like going forward, so the A321XLR is going to be a fantastic airplane for that. More square footage is going to be dedicated to premium cabins. It's the same thing for the 789s. We're doing a lot of reconfiguration programs right now, both the narrowbody and widebody.
So we'll be reconfiguring the entire 777-300 fleet, the 777-200 fleet for more premium. We're doing similar efforts on our narrowbody fleet for the 319s and 320s. They'll both be higher premium than they are today. So we do see it as a margin opportunity. It's not something publicly quantified yet, but we look at it with every reconfiguration program we do. The reason we're making this investment is because it drives a positive NPV and positive earnings.
Okay. And as you think about the sort of going back to that question around the priorities for the commercial team, right? You mentioned unit revenue. What about profitability? How are you thinking about the profitability of the airline kind of relative to peers? Right? There's a lot of commentary that says two airlines contribute 50 more % of the profit pool. And I just want to kind of take a perspective on it.
The perspective is this: when you take a look at margin differential, we can put 100% more of the difference in terms of revenue performance, and that's the upside. Again, we've had some headwinds this past year, which we don't need to go into, but things like 5342 and things like international and domestic balance. The kind of things that I pointed out, whether it's the Citi deal, the merchandising that we're doing, network, and making good use of our fleet, customer experience, all that is designed to improve our unit revenue performance. The only other thing I'll note is that, Devon, you may have more to say about it, but look, from a margin gap perspective versus some of the others, look, we do have our labor deals done. Okay? I feel great about it. Our team is taken care of.
We have confidence that our team is going to be out there focused on caring for customers for the next few years and not worrying about, "Am I going to get a competitive contract?
Okay.
Yeah. We know we're focused on the right areas. Both pre-COVID, we looked at relative margins all the time. We looked at relative margins on the EBITDA basis. I think everybody knows we have a different balance sheet than our competitors or than our large premium global carrier competitors today. But we're going to continue to repair that over time. But for today, you have to look at it on EBITDA because we're going to have different interest expense. We're going to have different aircraft rent expenses as we've made different financing decisions over the years. So we look at relative EBITDA margin versus our competitors. And on that front, during the teens, we were generally about the same margin versus United on the EBITDA level. Generally, we had a slight gap to Delta over that period. We came out of COVID in 2023.
We had the exact same EBITDA margin as United. We had a slight gap to Delta. Maybe it was about the same as Delta if you included the third-party business. In 2024, that changed, and we know why it changed in 2024. It was largely related to sales and distribution. That's an area where we've made a ton of progress this year, and we expect that we'll continue to close the gap going forward. We knew we had a huge opportunity with S&D, and we thought we were at a disadvantage versus our peers. That's going to be a huge tailwind for us going forward. This year, Robert's right, domestic versus international, impacted us. We think that's going to be a tailwind for us going forward, so there's a lot of things that we think are going to work very much in our favor as we look out.
We acknowledge there's a gap today. The other big part of it, obviously, is where we are at with our labor contracts. We've got them all in place. At least one of our competitors doesn't. That drives a margin differential this year. It's not something that's sustainable, though, so it's something that we think will close that gap going forward, but mostly, it's tailwinds for us. We think there's real opportunities to close that gap as we look out into 2026, and we expect to make progress on that next year.
All right. Thank you for that. So you mentioned Wi-Fi a couple of times, and I understand you're rolling satellite across the fleet. What about the idea of a Starlink or a lower satellite kind of network?
All those options are on the table. Right now, again, we're going to take AAdvantage of what we have in our fleet. And again, on the 787-9s, we have a Viasat product installed. And I can tell you, I was able to stream a lot of the college football happenings over the weekend in flight across the Atlantic. So it's a product that we continue to make refinements to and improvements to. But the good news is that, especially with all these reconfigurations that we're doing, we have the opportunity to make sure that we've got the best in the business. And we'll look at it. It's not just Starlink. There are other opportunities for low Earth satellites as well. So we'll take a look at those and make sure that we're competitive in the moment, okay, and not just talking about something that you'll have in three, four years.
So again, for American, when we say for AAdvantage members, free satellite Wi-Fi, we're talking about our domestic narrowbody fleet, any of our widebodies that have the Viasat product installed on it, our narrowbody aircraft, but for the 50-seaters that we have flying around, and that is, as we get into January, that's the product. It's not, "Oh, you get on a plane and you're not equipped.
Okay, so one of the questions I got from the audience here is, from an experience perspective, right, AI, large language models becoming a lot more prevalent in the way I think consumers are thinking about booking, as well as some of the internet intermediaries are kind of dabbling around this stuff. How are you guys thinking about integrating those tools into the front end, and what kind of revenue opportunity does that kind of present? How do you think about that as a revenue opportunity?
I'll just start with how we're looking at it from a corporate perspective. It's new technology and application across the entire company. I look at it as a tool, and it's something that is available to every organization and every team member. The first places that we've really put AI to use is on optimizations and making better decisions for how we run the airline. You'll see that our disruption handling, whether it's crews or aircraft or maintenance requirements, all of those, we're benefiting from being able to put the airline back together in a way that we hadn't been able to do before. With 1,700 aircraft, it's a really, really complex problem.
But this is something from an operations perspective, I think, is going to be a competitive AAdvantage in the long run because whether you're a 1,700 aircraft airline or you're a 200 aircraft airline, you need that technology. And we've got the ability to spread that kind of cost out over a much larger base. When we take a look at opportunities for our customers, it starts then with making sure that our customers are accommodated when there's any disruption in a way that is tailored to their needs. And so we're bringing that to bear on any type of disruption management at a customer level as well. When you get into how can we use AI and related technologies from a customer perspective and even generally?
In general.
Yeah. We've started with an inspiration tool. So look, tell us, "I want to take a weekend vacation someplace here, there, whatever. We can come back with a tailored offering." And we're doing that today. As we go forward, this is not about what you hear in some other forums about, "Hey, I'm going to find a way to trick you." For us, it's about making sure that we're offering our customers something that they want. It's about creating awareness and then great utility in terms of using the product as well. So what we've done from a corporate perspective is we've set up every organization with some efforts to train and to educate.
And then, through Devon, what he mentioned, our re-engineering the business efforts, just about every organization, we're putting through a screen to say, "Hey, where can we bring this technology to bear?" I mentioned some of the things we're doing already, but I anticipate that that is going to be something that benefits the re-engineering, the business effort from a revenue and a cost perspective as we look at latter stages of 2026 and beyond.
Do you think that technology could be transformative in a way in terms of what channel some of the leisure customers are being booked? Do you think you see an opportunity to maybe accelerate the pace of direct bookings, or do you see this as potentially an area where Google or whoever comes up with the right special sauce that then pushes it a little bit in a different direction?
You know what? We're going to work with our partners, okay, to come up with the best solutions. Certainly, my learnings over the last few years is that we need every customer, and wherever they want to go, we've got to make sure that they have the best offering and the latest in terms of what American puts on the table, so whether it's the agency world, whether it's from a direct perspective, I don't care. We're going to make sure that everyone has the ability to use American's products and services in a way that they can figure out how it's beneficial to them, so let's face it, this is going to be hugely beneficial to the consumer. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. There's going to be more information, more offerings, more ability to tailor.
And again, how you want to purchase that, whether it's directly from American or any one of our other partners, we're going to make sure that our partners are as well equipped as we are.
Okay. One area that I didn't hear come out was revenue management and pricing. How do you think about AI in the world of sort of the commercial sort of market manager level?
I'll just start with that. That was in my.
No, go ahead, Devon. Yeah, sorry.
It was in my opening comments that I think one of the big opportunities we have is in merchandising. And that technology is something that we can bring to bear in terms of being able to offer different products and services to customers at price points that they want to buy. And so taking advantage of the new configurations of aircraft and whether it's premium seating or any type of other amenity, we're going to make sure that we have the ability for cash, miles, different services bundled in different ways that customers see it and have an ability to really choose for themselves what's best for them.
Okay. So you mentioned the Citi partnership in your opening remarks. I was just wondering if there's anything that's special or unique about that relationship relative to some of the other co-brand agreements. And maybe you can talk a little bit about what that is.
Well, first off, I'd just say the opportunity ahead of us is huge. I know that Citi and the way that they're organized and the effort that they're putting into consumer credit and the whole co-branded credit card business. I feel like we have the absolute best partner that you can imagine. I think it's incredibly important to Citi. And clearly, it's important to us. Don't forget, with the AAdvantage program, this is a way that customers can not only tie themselves more tightly to Citi or to American, but this is a way that they can redeem and really fulfill their desire to go and travel. And that means booking seats. So as we take a look, we've been behind.
But what I see with Citi right now is being able to take advantage of some portions of their proprietary portfolio and giving the opportunity to exchange miles into the AAdvantage program. I see the opportunity for that ecosystem to grow and find utility that is even beyond just booking seats. So the prospects for this ultimately are more loyalty, more utility for our customers. And then ultimately, the picture that we've painted as cash remuneration gets to about $10 billion as we progress the decade, it's going to be a material boost to our P&L, another $1.5 billion.
And as you think about that, I think you guys have sketched out sort of 10% annual growth and remuneration over the next couple of years as we're getting closer to it, as you're seeing some of the changes in the structure of the program. Any thoughts on that number going up, down, sideways, right, left?
No. No changes in the expectations. We still expect it to grow around 10% a year. It won't happen like that every year. Some years there's going to be bonuses that come in at different rates. Some years will come in ahead on remuneration. Some years will come a little behind. It won't always translate directly to the P&L. There's going to be some revenue recognition component of it, but over time, we do expect to grow it by about 10% a year, and as Robert said, over time, we expect our EBIT improvement to be about $1.5 billion versus where we were in 2024, so a billion and a half versus 2024, and that's maybe not perfectly linearly, but close to it, a few hundred, $300 million each year to build up to that billion and a half.
Okay. And we spent all of 2025 getting ready for this launch. And just I would tell you, I like what I see in terms of getting ready for January. I think we're on track. All right. So you mentioned earlier you've been a little bit behind in international because of some of the delays on the 787s. Where do you see the best opportunity to deploy those aircraft in terms of maybe catching up? For your network, what are your priorities in terms of international growth?
It's not just 787s. It's the 321s.
321s. Yeah.
321s as well, and I think that Philadelphia has been hamstrung by, prior to the pandemic, 757s and 767s. We made what I believe was a smart move to really take advantage during the pandemic and make the fleet super efficient. It will be beneficial over the long run to have one flavor of widebodies where pilots, when they bid it, they can fly whatever you have, and it will be beneficial to have our 321s that are integrated into our domestic fleet as well, but where we look to leverage that right now is out of Philadelphia, that's a great East Coast hub, secondary cities in Europe. We certainly have the opportunity there. Maybe as you take a look down to Miami and DFW, have short-haul Latin that is capable.
And on the wide bodies, we want to make sure that first we take care of the franchise-type opportunities, which are JFK to London Heathrow or DFW to London Heathrow. You're going to see us have the most premium product in those places. But ultimately, every one of our hubs will benefit from this. And you'll see that we've got some new destinations coming out of Chicago for next year out of JFK and especially Philadelphia. Feel really good about that, but it will be spread throughout the network.
Okay. And when we talked earlier about the ASM growth envelope, were we thinking international maybe being at the higher end versus domestic the next couple of years? How do we think about?
It probably outpaces over the next five years anyway, just given that growth in the fleet. As Robert mentioned, we probably have 135-ish long-haul capable aircraft today. We have 20 more 787s on order. We have the remainder, so call it another 35 or so XLRs on order. But in addition to that, we have option positions for 25 or 30 787s. We have varying flexibility on the A321. So we can move from Neos to XLRs as we see fit over the years. So a lot of flexibility to grow international at an even faster rate. But even where it sits today, we'll be growing from 135 long-haul capable to somewhere around 200 long-haul capable by the end of the decade, which means ASM is probably growing a little bit faster rate on the long-haul side versus where we're at for short-haul international.
I'll just tie this one up, which is we have a great partnership network, okay, the joint business that we have with IAG, the Pacific Joint Business with JAL and our Qantas Joint Business, and a really strong relationship with Qatar. You'll see us take advantage of where we can find most to the greatest benefit out of our hubs like Philadelphia and secondary cities. But then out of the other hubs, you'll see us take advantage of those network partners as well. So for American, it's really important to have feed on both ends of those long-hauls. And with that partnership network, I think we're in a really good position. Okay. And I think during 3Q CapEx for next year was kind of ranged $4 billion-$4.5 billion. That's still kind of.
Yep. That's where we expect to come.
All right. And then maybe on the balance sheet side, right, obviously the repair and the debt pay down has been significant, but you still have a lot more leverage, a lot younger fleet. I'd like to get your perspective, Devon, on how comfortable are investors in understanding that fleet versus leverage issue? Because in my conversations, there's a lot of discussion around, well, just the gross leverage is so high. It's hard for people to kind of make that.
Yeah. I just always go back to the progress we made. We were sitting here in mid-2021 with $54 billion of total debt, and at that point, we put out this near-term goal that we would reduce that by $15 billion by the end of 2025. We achieved that goal at the end of 2024, so we had total debt inside of $39 billion at the end of last year. We went out with another target that said we'd be inside of $35 billion by the end of 2027. We're about halfway to that target right now, but still fully expect we'll be inside of $35 billion by the end of 2027. We're at our lowest debt and net debt positions that we've been in since 2015, 2016 timeframe. The issue for us right now is we need to get earnings to a better spot.
If we really want to get our debt is fine, we want to get leverage ratios to the right spot. We need to continue to improve earnings, and that's where we're focused pretty heavily. We think we're going to get margin expansion next year. We'd expect it again the year after that. The goal as we approach $35 billion in total debt is that Net Debt is going to be well inside of 3.0. Net Debt to EBITDA should be approaching that 3X, and at that point, we should be a couple notches higher on our credit rating than we are today. We have an objective to get to a double-B credit rating in the near term. We're probably a couple of years away from that, and then we can talk more about, hey, what are the next steps after that, but we've made a ton of progress.
We've got some goals in mind for the next couple of years. It was a big question from investors two or three years ago. It's less of a question today. At this point, it's just going to take time. We've talked about where CapEx is at. That does set us up really well for free cash flow production. $4 billion-$4.5 billion in total CapEx, we're just in a different spot than our peers are right now, and it's because we don't have replacement aircraft CapEx because of how young the fleet is, so we're set up for the potential of really strong free cash flow, which we're going to put towards continuing to strengthen the balance sheet.
How have you guys kind of discussed with the board what that level of net debt to EBITDA is as a target perspective, right? Some of your peers are talking about trying to get gross leverage down to 1X. Are you? I mean, that's obviously a ways away.
It takes time and free cash. For us, we think we're set up really well on the free cash side. So we've set this next goal. We'll come out with a longer-term goal as we continue to approach this $35 billion target and our 3X Net Debt to EBITDA target. We're probably a couple of years off of that. And then we'll set another goal on the balance sheet side.
Okay. We're coming here towards the end, but I guess when you think about the overall sort of capital return profile from an investor standpoint, where do you start to think about the cash returns to investors relative to debt pay down?
Yeah.
or is there a way to at least build a framework for people to think about and say, "If I get to that three times or if I get to two and a half times, then I can start thinking about optionality"?
We're looking forward to those conversations. Right now, we're focused on achieving these near-term balance sheet goals. We're really proud of the progress we're making. But you're right. As we start to produce a lot more free cash flow, which we think we're set up really well to do, and we start to achieve our balance sheet goals, then we can start talking more about what else we do with that cash. But for now, we're focused on the balance sheet.
Okay. We're coming up to the end here. Maybe, Robert, if you want to take us out, give us the high-level pitch on American as an equity.
I'll just start with this. I think that the tailwinds that we have are rooted in, again, just laying the foundation in a year that's been really difficult. But I'll start with the economic backdrop. I think that that is turning in American's favor. I do think that every chance that we've given the domestic consumer to come back to the table, we dump cold water on them, right? And we started the year where I had great confidence in it, and there was economic uncertainty and the accident, and all of a sudden, that stalls growth. We've got the government shutdown, which clearly impacted. But as we take a look into 2026, the supply and demand balance, I think, favors the domestic marketplace, which, again, American has a weighting in.
What we've done to prepare and be ready for that consumer return and also take advantage of premium and taking advantage of the international traffic that is out there, we're in great shape. We produce ASMs in the most efficient manner. We have the ability to take advantage of our Citi deal, our network, the fleet, and product that we put out. And I think that as we look into 2026, it's great things. 2026 is American's centennial year, 100 years. We're getting ready to launch a number of initiatives around that. We're the airline of the World Cup here in the U.S. You've seen us do a lot of advantage promotion with that. We're really pleased with what we see. Can't wait to take care of customers as they travel throughout North America, getting from game to game.
It's going to be a big year for us, and we're set up very well.
Great. Well, with that, I want to close this out here so we can get you all on schedule. I want to thank you guys all for making the time, Neil, Matt, and Devon and Robert. I really appreciate you guys coming out and supporting the conference. And thanks for your time today.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks.