American Airlines finally finds its Raja successor, ex-Delta/Alaska/oneworld exec Nat Piper
The airline had been looking for a new CCO since its attempted transformation in sales strategy.
American Airlines has finally found its successor to Vasu Raja, the former Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), who left the company in June 2024, after the airline’s attempted sales strategy transformation went haywire, with the carrier still suffering aftershocks of that decision to this day.
Shortly after the carrier unveiled its – mixed, at best – Q3 2025 financial results, American Airlines also unveiled that it finally has its Raja successor, Nathaniel Piper, who has been the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of oneworld since April 1, 2024. Piper will assume the role of CCO on November 3, American Airlines said.
Piper, in addition to his tenure as the chief executive of the oneworld alliance, which American Airlines is part of, was previously the Senior Vice President of Fleet, Finance, and Alliances at Alaska Airlines, and worked at Northwest Airlines and its successor after their merger, Delta Air Lines.
Meanwhile, Steve Johnson, who replaced Raja and helped the airline “lead the search for a new Chief Commercial Officer,” will return to only being the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of American Airlines.
According to Robert Isom, the CEO of American Airlines, Piper is “a world-class, results-oriented leader,” and is “well-versed in the airline business, having led teams across multiple disciplines at Northwest, Delta, and Alaska.”
Isom thanked Johnson for covering the CCO position after Raja’s departure, saying that he had “accomplished exactly what needed to be done by reinvigorating our commercial strategy, delivering strong results, and setting new standards of accountability for that team.”
“He has set up our Commercial team perfectly for this transition and will seamlessly return to his work, driving strategy development and strategic positioning for American.”
American Airlines began looking for a new CCO, at least officially, in May 2024, when it announced that Raja, who joined the airline in 2004 and had been working as the CCO since April 2022, would leave the company in June 2024.
The decision to part ways – whether the decision was mutual or not – with Raja was made after its change in how it distributes tickets to corporate travelers, including businesses, which backfired, and as the airline itself admitted, has continued to affect it to this day.
The Q3 2025 results announcement read that by the end of the year, it expects that it “will have fully restored its share of indirect revenue that was impacted by its former sales strategy." The carrier has now shifted focus “to expanding its share of indirect revenue beyond historical levels, which, combined with improved distribution capabilities, is expected to produce meaningful value for the airline.”
American Airlines’ Q3 passenger – not overall – revenue was down 0.4% year-on-year (YoY). It was the only loss-making Big 4 airline in the United States that also reported a drop in passenger revenue during the quarter.
Rytis Beresnevicius
In December 2021, American Airlines announced that it would become the first US airline to integrate the New Distribution Capability (NDC), a solution developed by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). According to the association, the solution is “a travel industry-supported program” that “enables the travel industry to transform the way air products are retailed to corporations, leisure, and business travelers, by addressing the industry’s current distribution limitations.”
At the time, American Airlines said that the new sales process would be fully integrated in North America in early 2022, previously launching integration of NDC with Amadeus’ Global Distribution System (GDS) for Europe point-of-sale.
“Travel advisors and corporations using the Amadeus Travel Platform for points of sale in North America will soon enjoy a more seamless shopping, booking, ticketing, and travel management experience.”
It expanded the NDC’s integration by adding Travelport and Sabre’s GDS in 2023.
While exploring the jungle of acronyms can get confusing, during the airline’s Q1 2023 earnings call, Raja stated that before the pandemic, its top 60% business travelers “produced well over 80% of all the business travel revenue at American Airlines.”
“When you look at that in 2023, that same population of unique customers is actually spending 15% more on flight revenue with the airline,” Raja continued, highlighting the fact that the nature of their travel had shifted, and instead of 50% of their travel being business-related, it was down to less than 40% at that point. 10% to 15% of that rearrangement had gone to blended – leisure and business – trips, but those bookings had disappeared “entirely out of the travel agency distribution channel into our direct channels” like its website and its mobile apps.
Direct channels also included those tickets sold through its new distribution technologies, since American Airlines considered direct services that enable it to “provide the right level of retail experience, selling, and servicing to the customer," Raja explained.
Raja noted that, as these trends had accelerated, American Airlines made changes to its network and its loyalty program, and the sales and servicing of its product was “the next and very important part.”
“[…] what we have realized is so many of those customers are going direct, frankly, because they are used to a consumer experience than any other retailer, where […] they can buy the product and shop digitally, and they can service it themselves.”
The ex-CCO detailed that traditional travel agency technology had not allowed the airline to roll out the same services compared to its own, direct sales channels, and that the new travel agency technology has allowed American Airlines to do it.
That was something that was supposed to benefit travel agencies, especially the forward-thinking companies, and at that point, Raja said that the carrier had been extremely encouraged by the results.
“We have had 3 or 4 weeks now where we have been migrating more services and more of our fair products into this new distribution technology, and the results have been extremely encouraging.”
In Q1 2023, 10% of its revenue was booked by travel agencies, and going forward, “virtually all of their future bookings” had been coming through the carrier’s direct channels. By the end of 2023, American Airlines had planned that more than 80% of its bookings would be made directly, according to Raja.
By the end of 2023, American Airlines’ quarterly revenues, passenger and total, were down 1% YoY. Full-year, they were up high single digits, and during the Q4 2023 call, Raja said that American Airlines would double down on the strategy and lean into AAdvantage customers who are buying premium content, such as seat upgrades, through its direct channels.
“We invite all the travel managers and all of the travel agencies of the world to join us in this because this is great for customers, and it should be great for them too.”
But what changed, considering that just four months after this call, Raja was out?
On May 29, 2024, Isom told attendees of the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference that American Airlines faced “softness in coastal bookings relative to our expectations that we believe is in part due to the changes that we have made to our sales and distribution strategy,” resulting in the downgraded earnings outlook it published on May 28, 2024. (The news about Raja’s departure also came out on May 28.)
“We spent a lot of time listening to our agencies and our corporate customers, and we're hearing and we hear their feedback.”
Isom said that while NDC and other internet-based channels were the future, the carrier moved “faster than we should and we did not execute well,” concluding by saying that the company regretted “the difficulties that it created for our agency and corporate communities.”
During the Q2 2024 earnings call, Isom admitted that American Airlines’ “current revenue performance is not where we wanted to be,” noting that this was why the airline had made “a sizable adjustment to [its] revenue and earnings expectations for the second quarter, driven by an imbalance in domestic supply and demand and [its] prior sales and distribution strategy.”
It ended 2024 with a full-year net profit of $846 million and with total revenues of $54.2 billion. Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, arguably its biggest competitors, ended the year with net profits of $3.4 billion and $3.1 billion, respectively. The pair’s revenues were $61.6 billion and $57 billion.
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