American Airlines parent AMR loses $97M in 4Q

DALLAS (AP)— American Airlines is doing much better than a year ago, bringing in more revenue than expected, but it's still losing money and trailing other big airline companies.

American also says it's talking with Expedia and Orbitz about getting its flights listed again on the online travel agencies' websites. The dispute over how airline tickets are distributed threatens to make American flights harder to find — one more challenge facing the nation's third-biggest airline company.

American parent AMR Corp. said today it lost $97 million in the fourth quarter, or 29 cents per share. That's a smaller loss than AMR posted a year ago, and it beat the forecast of analysts, who expected a loss of 36 cents per share, according to FactSet.

Revenue was better than expected — $5.59 billion, compared with analysts' forecast of $5.47 billion. American made $599 million in "other revenues," from the sale of frequent-flier miles, on-board food sales, fees for checked bags and other services.