American Airlines First Quarter Traffic Dips

American Airlines released its March and first quarter traffic results on Tuesday, showing a slight drop in passenger traffic.

American carried 17.16 million passengers in March, and 43.38 million for the quarter, falls of 0.5 and 1.2 percent respectively.

Passenger traffic for March in revenue passenger miles (RPM) was down 1.2 percent on lower available seat miles (ASM) capacity, down 0.9 percent. The resulting load factor was 81.5 percent, a 0.2 percentage point drop.

For the quarter to end March, American’s RPM passenger traffic dropped 1.5 percent, with ASM capacity down 1.1 percent, and load factor 0.4 percentage points down at 79.2 percent.

AA reduced capacity in all market segments, with east coast domestic flights seeing the biggest drop of 6.9 percent. Latin America routes saw a capacity drop of 6.7 percent during the quarter.

RPM domestic traffic fell in all areas except on Pacific routes, which had a 24.1 percent increase. International routes traffic was also down 0.9 percent in Q1.

The airline includes Canada, Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands flights in its domestic results.

American said it expects first quarter 2017 total revenue per available seat mile (TRASM) to be up by about 2 to 4 percent, against 1Q16. That compares to previous guidance of a TRASM improvement of between 1.5 and 3.5 percent.