FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — American Airlines Group Inc. is moving its headquarters but staying in the neighborhood.
Airline executives told employees this week that American will build a new home about a 2-mile drive from its current headquarters. American will remain close to its biggest hub, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, and keep a Fort Worth address. The company said it take down the former Sabre Holdings headquarters building on the northeast corner of Trinity Boulevard and Highway 360 and build four buildings on the 41-acre site.
Executive Vice Presidents Stephen Johnson and Elise Eberwein said in a memo the two buildings that make up American’s current home are older — built in the 1980s — inefficient, and becoming expensive to maintain. They are “inconvenient and uninviting to non-headquarters employees,” the executives said. About 5,000 people work there.
The new location is next to American’s operations and training centers and its C.R. Smith Museum. American plans to break ground on the four-building complex next spring and move in by summer or early fall 2018. The company didn’t disclose costs. The city of Fort Worth will likely have some incentives to offer to the company for keeping the headquarters in the city, but no details have been disclosed. At one point, American Airlines was rumored to be strongly considering a site in Irving.
It was a triumph for the Dallas-Fort Worth area when American moved to Texas from New York in 1979, one of several big companies that relocated to the region including Exxon Mobil Corp. and J.C. Penney Co. American moved into its current home in 1988. CEO Doug Parker had said the company was considering a new home and that Fort Worth had the inside track. – Robert Francis of FWB contributed to this report.