Full Video: American Airlines Commercial Chief Vasu Raja at Skift Global Forum 2022

The blurring of lines between leisure and business trips — also known as the "great merging" — is one of the lasting changes of the Covid-19 pandemic. No where is that more evident than at airlines, where the old calculus that people were either on a leisure or a business trip but never both was upended.

American Airlines, after analyzing who was flying in the early days of the pandemic when most of the world was in lockdown, realized the old paradigm of leisure and business travel did not apply anymore. It found that, even before the crisis, as many as 25 percent of trips were what Chief Commercial Officer Vasu Raja called "blended trips" at the Skift Global Forum. That number has only grown, now accounting for nearly half of American's revenues today and driving the "real revenue growth in the airline."

Watch Raja's full on-stage appearance with Skift founder and CEO Rafat Ali, as well as read a transcript of it, below.