Robert Isom
President at American Airlines Group
Thanks, Doug and good morning everyone. I want to start by thanking the entire American Airlines team for their effort in the fourth quarter and throughout the entire pandemic and I'd like to reiterate how honored I am to be taking on the role as CEO. I want to express my appreciation for Doug's partnership and friendship over the years. As you all know Doug leaves behind an incredible legacy having opened many doors for our airline and our industry.
I look forward to continuing to work closely with him over the coming months to ensure a seamless transition. I'm taking on this role at a very important time for American. Over the past few years, our airline and our industry have gone through a period of transformative change and American has made good use of that time, especially in regard to renewing our fleet, facilities and network, and making the company as efficient as possible.
For fleet, we have dramatically simplified. We now operate just four fleet types that gives us operating flexibility, reliability, and efficiency. American fleet remains the youngest in the US network carriers, our aircraft are equipped with industry-leading WiFi, new interiors, and we've added seats to our 737 and A321 fleets bring us more in line with rest of the industry.
For facilities, we have expanded the number of gates we operate at our largest hubs in Dallas-Fort Worth and Charlotte and we have inaugurated a wonderful new regional concourse at Reagan National which is historically our most profitable hub. We've also invested more than $200 million in lounges over the past five years with new Admirals Club lounges opening at Reagan National La Guardia. New and upgraded airport spaces are underway in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well.
We've also updated maintenance, training and corporate spaces throughout the system to ensure our team can perform at an even higher level. For network, we are fine[phonetic] more to where our customers want to go. Our DFW and Charlotte hubs are primed to operate in more than 900 and 700 flights per day, respectively. Our partnerships with JetBlue in the Northeast, Alaska, and the West Coast want to create an industry-leading presence in markets that have historically been difficult for American and our proposed investments in South American carrier strengthened our already industry-leading position in that region.
The demand continues to recover and we return to full utilization of our assets, American is poised to outperform. We've extracted $1.3 billion of efficiencies that we're operating and economic fleet that will provide CASM, ex tailwinds as capacity is restored. Based on our current assumptions we expect all of this to result in a return to profitability later this year and continued deleveraging as we pay down $15 billion of debt by the end of 2025 and I am excited to hit the ground running in April to build on our momentum to deliver results in 2022. So let's get to the business in the quarter.
This morning, American reported a fourth quarter GAAP net loss of $931 million in a full year GAAP net loss of $2 billion. Excluding net special items we reported a net loss of $921 million for the quarter and a net loss of $5.4 billion for the full year. Our results for 2021 were significantly improved over 2020, but the impact of the Omicron variant has affected the timing of a full revenue recovery.
We delivered a strong revenue performance in the fourth quarter despite the rise in infections. We reported fourth quarter revenues of $9.4 billion, our highest for any quarter since the start of the pandemic, and a sequential increase of $458 million from the third quarter. Our cargo team continues to do a fantastic work and delivered record cargo revenues of $1.3 billion in 2021, 30% higher than our previous record. As we've seen throughout the pandemic each new period and corresponding increase in cases is followed by a faster recovery of demand with fewer regulatory restrictions and changes in travel policies.
Based on what we're seeing, we expect Omicron to follow the same pattern. Bookings are recovering quickly after dropping off considerably in early December but they are still not backed to pre-Omicron levels. Leisure travel, particularly in the US and short haul international market remains very strong and is approaching a 100% recovery. We expect this trend to continue and interestingly, we've seen many of our customers that have historically -- we've historically called leisure travelers are actually flying for reasons beyond just vacation.
They may fly to a beach or a mountain destination, but they're actually going to work remotely for the week. The lines between leisure and business travel are definitely blur[phonetic]. The recovery of international and business travel slowed late in the fourth quarter given the Omicron but we remain very bullish on both. The return to international travel is directly linked to travel restrictions around the globe as restrictions fall off we expect international travel to pick up considerably.
We still expect business travel to come back and forth, but it will come back in a different way, and by that I mean the overall mix of business customers how they travel and how we serve them. As we have shared previously small and medium -- medium size business travel remains the strongest segment. In the fourth quarter small and medium business travel was roughly 80% recovery, while large corporate travel was only 40% recovery.
In addition, small and medium business revenue had sequential month over month improvement in December in spite of the impact of Omicron. We're optimistic that as corporate travel -- as corporate travel returns in a significant way this year, and as companies come back more fully into the office and get back on the road we're going to be back on track. But as we're developing our plans and forecast for this year, we're working to build an airlines that can be profitable even without the full return of managed corporate travel.
The demand environment has changed a lot through the pandemic because of this, we have to be nimble and responsive. We have built agile processes that allow us to deliver the network, our customers need and want, no matter the environment. The game has changed and our team is ready.
Going back our network the way we did in 2020 is a feat in and of itself, but to do so while running a reliable operation and achieving strong revenue results along the way make it even more impressive. We entered 2022 with tremendous confidence as a result of the way we finished last year and started the new year. As Doug noted, American had the best reliability of all US carriers in December and the highest annual likelihood to recommend scores in our history.
We're very pleased that 97% of our team has been vaccinated or submitted a request for an accommodation with no one losing their job. We put creative agreements in place with our union partners to support the operations throughout the pandemic and just recently reached new contract extensions for some of our team members to start the year. All of this while flying more flights and more passengers than any other US carrier by a wide margin.
To ensure this momentum continues, we have two sharply focused priorities for this year. Running a reliable airline for our customers and returning to profitability. Returning to profitability is very much tied to the demand revenue environment. But as I mentioned, the work we have done during the pandemic has positioned us very well. This includes our cost efficiency actions which Derek will touch on momentarily as well as the work that we have done to refocus our network around our most profitable clients.
Enhancing our partnerships around the US and around the world and driving value through the AAdvantage program and co-brand cards has been something[phonetic] that we've done well and on an absolute basis, new advantage of member of acquisitions in 2021 outpaced 2019 despite lower levels of capacity and our advantage revenues in 2021 closed in on 2019 revenues.
So in summary, we're grateful for the incredible work of the American Airlines team over the past year. We remain optimistic about the return of demand. We're very pleased with how American is positioned thanks to the tremendous efforts of our team and now with that, I'll turn it over to Derek.