Welcome everybody. I'm pretty excited to be here at the Congonhas Airport. Those of you that have followed the Azul story for years know that it's always been our dream to share our product and really be at this principal airport in São Paulo. What we get to do next year is very exciting, and we're gonna kinda walk you through that. You know, it's been a couple years of difficult times for airlines in the world, and you know, specifically, Azul had its challenges with the COVID pandemic. We focused a lot of our effort with investors and, you know, stakeholders about, you know, how we managed that crisis, right? You know, we walked you through the management plan, you know, more than 12,000 people taking unpaid leave of absences.
You know, how we worked with our partners, our lessors. How we, you know, actively went out and really, you know, managed a very difficult time when we had almost a year with no revenue, okay. We're not gonna talk about that today. You know, that's the credibility that we have as a management team and how we managed through that. We're gonna talk about today is what we were in 2019 and what we are now in 2022, looking forward to 2023. Okay. We're gonna talk through all of the metrics of Azul. What Azul looked like, what the country looked like, things that are outside of our control and things that are inside of our control, and kind of what those big differences are, and how we have improved the underlying business substantially since 2019.
A lot of you think, Oh, Azul's been managing a cash situation. Azul's been managing, you know, the COVID pandemic. We have, we've effectively managed that. We improved the business tremendously in that same period of time, that's what we wanna walk you through today and show it to you. I'm gonna start with kinda some of the uglier stuff, okay? These are things I don't control, okay? In 2019, the currency was BRL 3.95. This year it's averaged BRL 5.15. Completely out of our control. Let's just put the elephant in the room and say it is what it is, right? How can Azul effectively manage in a situation where our currency's devalued 30%? That's what we had to deal with when we have U.S. dollar-based costs like fuel, aircraft rent, maintenance. That's a huge challenge that we have.
Going to the next slide, you'll see our fuel price doubled. Once again, not in our control. How do you manage a 30% devaluation in your currency and a doubling of your fuel price, okay. Now we're gonna kinda walk through everything that we've done. There's also one other big negative thing that I think the sell side likes to focus on because the sell side doesn't believe enough in our business, okay. Which is that corporate demand is also down, right? Corporate volume, people are on Zoom, so we can say hi to the sell side analysts that are in the United States today and some of the buy side that's watching us. People are traveling less. We'll give you that assumption for now, right?
We'll say that, you know, their corporate demand is down about 12%. We have the bad guy of currency, we have the bad guy on fuel, and we have the bad guy on less volumes. You say, Geez, what can they do to overcome these big challenges, and how are they better effectively managing their business? What have we done? Well, we've actually increased our volume. We have 6% more domestic passengers, even though everybody told us that everybody's gonna sit at home and watch Zoom calls, right? Now we've actually have more domestic passengers flying in the country. We're starting to make up for the high fuel prices, the devalued currency, and volume. Going to the next slide. Azul gained market share. Every time there's a crisis, there's an opportunity to improve your business, and that's what we have done.
We went from roughly 23% market share to 1/3 of the Brazilian market in the last three years. If you kinda go back to 2018, kind of pre-Avianca's bankruptcy, we were at 18%. We've gone from 18% up to 30% in a very short period of time. Now let's talk about revenue. Our revenue is up 40% from 2019. 40% from 2019. That's with lower corporate volumes, as we talked about. Our business overall is significantly larger than it was in 2019. We're making up for it in volume. Going to the next slide, you'll see. Look at what's happened with fares, okay? As you go to the next slide here, our fares are up 43%. Guess what? When your currency devalues 30%, you need higher fares, and that's simply what we did.
We've increased fares 43% while we've kept stage length flat. Think about that for a second. Our fares are 43% higher than they were in 2019, okay? I think that that's a huge testament to the strength of our business model, our ability to pass on fares, the strength of our network overall that Abhi will walk you through, where we're the only carrier in a lot of the routes that we fly, and there's good demand in the market. You know, if you take any investor that bought Azul shares in 2019, nobody thought it was possible to increase revenue as much as we did. You just simply didn't think it was possible. It was essential to do because of the new currency environment and the new fuel environment.
You know, as you look at this, it's interesting to see that the market. These are the new market fares. In the last 30 days alone, heating oil, which is the derivative that closely matches jet fuel, is down over 20%. It's down over 20% while we still have these fares, okay? That's moving forward the strength of the business. As we go to the next slide here, you can see what we're doing on unit revenue, passenger revenue and overall RASK, up significantly. Abhi will walk you through how he's been able to do that. As I look forward to the next slide here, our average fare is up significantly. Our revenue is up significantly as well. This is on our corporate fares, right?
Even though the volume is lower, the corporate customers are paying significantly more to travel, right? I think that is the big difference as to kinda where we are today. Let's take a look at the leisure segment, 'cause a lot of people said, Oh, leisure is just the pent-up demand. It's not gonna come back. Let's take a quick look at the leisure market. This is the leisure market here, what we've done in average fare, our leisure demand and revenue growth. I'm gonna pass it over to Abhi to kinda walk you through how he's been able to do that and why we think this is the new norm in Brazil, we'll be able to maintain these levels going forward.
Thanks, John. Hey, everyone. Good morning. Great to see all of you in person, especially very happy to see so many Azul crew members here and all of you online as well. You know, as John talked about, the secret to revenue performance this year has been average fares. He's right. You know, if you asked us, you asked the competition 6 months ago at the start of the year, would it be possible to get fares at these levels and sustain at these levels? Probably none of us would have said it would have been. It actually has happened, and it's been sustained. One of the questions was, is this pent-up demand or is this really sustained demand? The example that we use is the leisure market.
The leisure market was one of the first to break pre-pandemic levels in terms of revenues. It's actually gotten better, and it's sustained. It's been over 14, 16 months of strong leisure demand. That's something that's, you know, answers the question that, is this pent-up demand or is this the new level of demand? I actually think us and the industry have done a really good job of maintaining that discipline and focusing on what's important, which is higher unit revenues and higher average fares. I think we've gotten used to these results. I think the customers as well have gotten used to this. We're not seeing You know, of course, customers would love to pay less if they had the opportunity, but we're not seeing any resistance in terms of the traffic, in terms of the volumes, in terms of customer feedback even.
We really think that, as John said, even if fuel were to come down, and it has come down the last couple of weeks, the industry and us for sure, we're going to be maintaining these fares, based on strong demand, based on seasonality, to make sure we can take advantage. This really, I think, is a structural shift in how the industry is behaving, and I think it's a very positive shift in how the industry is behaving. That's on the domestic side. If you look on the international side, something similar has happened also. Our international unit revenues are up 70% compared to pre-pandemic. Those of you that have flown have seen the average fares on the international markets as well. We've slowly brought back international capacity. We are still not yet at pre-pandemic international capacity.
We are domestically. We're about 20% above in domestic capacity versus pre-pandemic, but we're about 10%-15% below international, and we are ramping up slowly. By the end of this year, by the end of first quarter next year, we will get back to 100% of international capacity. That's coming at very, very healthy unit revenues. That's a small part of our business, about 15%, but it's coming in at very, very healthy unit revenues and very, very strong average fares. This is also a very, very good sign as we head into next year, where most of our capacity growth is going to be from international because of the ramp-up effect of this year.
We're gonna be adding that capacity, bringing back that capacity at very, very healthy unit revenues and in a very, very healthy market. It's also a market that is constrained by capacity. You know, Our friends in the U.S. have talked about pilots and aircraft and how they're having to manage their networks, and that is being translated into international capacity. The U.S.-Brazil market is still down in capacity 25%-30% versus pre-pandemic. The Brazil-Europe market is still down in capacity versus pre-pandemic. We are slowly bringing that capacity on in a disciplined manner to take advantage of the very strong market dynamics in international. We continue to see strong bookings. We talked about in our October traffic release that October was a record unit revenue month. We just finished November.
It is another record unit revenue month, right? Not revenue absolute, unit revenue. Revenues per ASK, we're setting records every single month. We continue to see bookings volume for the future as well. November was also a record bookings month for the future in terms of our passenger business and all the business units as well, which we'll talk about a little bit later. As we head into now our peak seasonality, which is November, December, January, Carnaval, March, Easter, all the way through until April, there's good seasonality ahead of us, and a good competitive environment, good fair environment for us to take advantage. Our network continues to develop, and we're very happy with how the network has developed since the pandemic. We are December 16th, we should get to 1,000 peak daily flights.
That's, you know, we are in terms of our reach, our network is broader. We have more destinations, approaching 160 destinations, and we use connectivity very much in our favor, as you can see on this slide. We've developed the network very well since the start of the pandemic. We've added destinations, we've added connectivity, and we've done all this within the strength of our network. If you look at our competitive position, 80% of our routes, we still fly alone, and this is as we've grown. What's interesting is that since we went public, since 2019, as we have grown, we've continued to maintain our leadership position where we fly.
This number of 80% has been very constant over the last several years as we've added capacity, as we've grown, because we are focusing where we are strong. What makes us strong is our connectivity. We are the broadest network in Brazil in terms of destinations, in terms of departures, and we use connectivity all over the country. In the north, for example, Manaus and Belém are key focus cities for us. In fact, we'll be just starting on December 15th, Manaus to Fort Lauderdale and Belém to Fort Lauderdale, with our narrow body aircraft, right? Providing great connectivity for that part of the region, not have to come down to São Paulo and then go back up again to the US. Also great connectivity within the region. A lot of these routes are uncontested routes.
We fly them with ATRs, some with Caravans, some with Embraers. Some of these routes in the pandemic was a Caravan. Now it's an A321, right? 'Cause that's the flexibility we have with our fleet, and that's the connectivity that we drive. The North is important for us. Recife, right, is our northeast hub. In the U.S., it's like San Francisco or Los Angeles, basically. We connect to all the capitals in the region. Great demographics in Recife. Corporate, very strong corporate demand. I think the strongest co-corporate demand in the northeast is in Recife. The strongest demand generation of any city is in Recife, and it's become a technology center. It's become a manufacturing center. It's a great cargo market, a very dense cargo market. Recife has been one of our fastest-growing hubs and continues to do so.
We're very, very happy and a lot of connectivity going through the Northeast. In the Midwest, the Agro region, Cuiabá is our focus city, and obviously very, very strong with the market there, the demographics in the region. Many uncontested markets here again. Using the fleet flexibility that Alex will talk about next, and really using the combination of small aircraft feeding medium-sized aircraft, feeding larger size aircraft via our focus cities and hubs. The south of Brazil, you know, which is São Paulo, Campinas, southeast, of course, is our largest hub. 200 daily departures just from Campinas. All of our international, except for Recife now. The largest domestic single airline hub in South America. Driving a lot of connectivity and also a lot of local demand.
When we first started Azul, we were unsure how much demand there was in the region, we had the buses from São Paulo coming to Campinas. Today, that traffic is less than 5% of our demand that goes in and out of Campinas. Lot of corporate demand. All demand generation in the region. region has grown, and we have grown with it. We're very, very happy, of course, with Campinas. In the south, Curitiba and Porto Alegre, we use the Caravan, we use the ATRs to feed into our network. Brazil is mostly a north-south network because of geography, a lot of traffic starts in the south, goes through the Midwest and goes to the north, northeast. That's the structure of our domestic network, and it works really, really well.
A lot of competitive advantages, structural competitive advantages, combining the fleet flexibility with the structure of the network. We've done something similar as well on the international side. You know, this is sort of a quiet development, but we are now very relevant with many partners around the world. We have connectivity with United, with TAP, with Copa, and lots of airlines around the world that fly into Brazil, and we give them connectivity in São Paulo, but also as some of those airlines look to the other cities around Brazil. TAP, for example, in Belo Horizonte, Copa in Belo Horizonte, or Air Europa in Salvador, for example. We have the most destinations of any airline, and so we provide a lot of value to these airlines as they want to explore not just São Paulo, but also other parts of Brazil.
We are actually a relevant partner for these international airlines flying into Brazil. We've done something similar for our long-haul network. This is again, has been a quiet development, but we've slowly been increasing our capabilities via our distribution, via our site, our app, so that you can actually buy the partners and have really seamless experience, Azul to TAP or Azul to United, Azul to JetBlue. Just in Europe, we serve all the capitals, right? Via our double-daily flights to Lisbon and our partnership with TAP. In the U.S. with United and JetBlue, with all the major cities and the Caribbean, Cancun, Punta Cana, New York, Boston, Las Vegas, we have that one-stop connectivity with our partners in the U.S. as well. This is... Why is this important? Because it adds layers of demand.
It adds layers of demand to our international flights, to our long-haul flights that we didn't have before. This is responsible for some of the RASK improvements as well. Any long-haul airline will tell you that connectivity is important, and this has been a structural change in how we distribute our partners. You can go on Azul's app, and you can buy from Curitiba to Boston on the app exactly the same way that you would buy Curitiba to Salvador. Exactly the same experience, it's really significantly increased how we're able to sell our partner and bring demand to our network. That's obviously gonna be very, very important as we grow our international network next year. With that, I'll hand over to Alex to talk about the fleet.
Hey, everyone. Abhi just talked a lot about one of our big sources of competitive advantage, which is the network, and how the network is significantly better today than it was in 2019, right? That in spite of the fact that, you know, for example, corporate hasn't recovered fully, and you still have a lot of airlines around the world that haven't come back to the same level of connectivity that they had pre-COVID. We're back and way bigger than we were before. The network's a lot stronger. The fleet, which is another source of competitive advantage, is better as well. If you remember what we had discussed when we, you know, entered the pandemic, we said we were gonna keep the fleet fairly constant, right?
It's gonna go up a couple of aircraft here and there, but the main thing that we're doing, that we're way ahead of the competition, is we're replacing our old generation aircraft with next generation aircraft, right? Now with demand coming back, you know, if you remember, we postponed all the deliveries that we're gonna get in 2020 into 2023 and 2024. Now 2023 is here, right? We can resume that fleet transformation. You can see that the fleet's gonna stay fairly constant. We are going to increase capacity by the kinda mid-single digits, but most of that capacity growth is international. It's not domestic. It's the strength in the international demand that Abhi talked about that's coming back. We can utilize our wide-body aircraft for international destinations as we did before and also the upgauging, right?
When we go from an old generation E1 to, for example, an A321, we add almost 100 seats, but we don't necessarily add departures, right? The unit cost on those seats is so low that we can stimulate demand without having to interfere with the original demand, right? This is very healthy, very disciplined growth enabled by these amazing economics, right? A lot of you may think, Hey, every airline is gonna go from old generation to next generation. Azul is different because we're gonna go from old generation to next generation, small to big, expensive to cheap, right? This is the unique advantage that Azul has, which drives these economics that when we go from an E1 to an E2, every seat is 26% cheaper to produce. When we go from an E1 to an A321neo, 34% reduction.
The airlines that are gonna go from old gen to next gen are gonna see 12% reduction, 13%, 14%, nothing like what we're seeing, right? We already had, you know, best in class margins before the pandemic, right? This is actually gonna help us expand and go beyond the profitability that we have. The other nice thing is that all of these aircraft, we get to utilize them a lot more. The way our network has grown over time, we can deploy these aircraft in longer routes, get higher efficiency from them, you're generating also more ASKs, again, without necessarily adding departures, without adding, you know, costs, without having to compete for that additional capacity that you're offering. We're way ahead of the competition in terms of fleet transformation.
We already have 70% of our capacity coming from next gen, low fuel burn, low carbon emissions aircraft. We remain committed to being 100% by 2026. I mean, we'd love to be there tomorrow, right? We'll show you again a little bit of the economics on the fleet transformation. The best thing we can do is go as quickly as possible to next gen aircraft. We have, you know, we have to wait for the operating leases on the old aircraft to essentially expire so that we can replace them with next gen. This is sort of the plan for the next few years until we get to 100%, right?
Getting a little bit into the details of what kind of benefit this brings and why this fleet is so much better today than it was in 2019. We're burning 12% less fuel per ASK than 2019, right? We actually started our fleet transformation in 2016, right? If you go all the way back to when we started the fleet transformation, the reduction is even higher. Just from 2019 to today, it's a 12% fuel consumption reduction, right? Which again, translates directly into higher profitability since fuel is by far our largest expense line item. There's the upgauging, right? Remember, everybody's gonna go to a lower fuel burn aircraft, but normally, you're gonna go from a Boeing 737 to a Boeing 737 or an A320 to an A320.
We're going from an E1 to an E2 or an A320 or an A321. We upgauge and we increase the average size of the aircraft per departure, which gives you economies of scale. Drives higher productivity across the board, right? It reduces unit costs. Same thing with international, right? We're going from an A330ceo to A330neos and A350s. You know, essentially they burn the same amount of fuel, but they generate a lot more seats, and you get a significant economy of scale here. This is just summarizing, you know, just using kinda like for like the Embraer E1 to the Embraer E2. You know, one of the things that, you know, is part of our story, obviously, the Embraer is a big part of how we built our network, a big part of our success, but we have very expensive E1s.
We took the E1s when we were a brand new airline, a start-up airline, you know, not established. We hadn't established our credit history yet. The cost of capital at the time was very high, and there was a shortage of E1s at the time, right? We pay about, you know, like you see here, in terms of rent, we're actually gonna see a reduction of 20% in the rent that we pay for an E2 compared to an E1. This is a bigger aircraft which burns less fuel, right? Normally, if you go from a small aircraft to a big aircraft or from a high fuel burn to a low fuel burn aircraft, you would expect a higher rent. Some of that benefit that you're getting, you're gonna have to give back to the manufacturer.
We're actually gonna pay less rent per E2 than we pay for an E1.
Hey, if I could just add, you know, because we're so far along in our fleet transformation and our competitors are behind us, the cost of capital in the world has gone up. That's the new norm. The fact that we've already locked in these lease deals well in advance, this advantage will carry with us for the next decade as well. As somebody replaces a Boeing 737 MAX, a CEO with a NEO, they're doing that now at the higher capital cost that exists in the world today. The fact that we will be 83% of our ASKs next gen in 2023 when our primary competitors are embarking upon that journey right now, it's a competitive advantage that we'll have and hold with us for the next decade.
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, for a brief period of time, obviously during the pandemic, aircraft was cheap, right? If you had the ability to take aircraft, you could get it for a very cheap price. The problem is, if you didn't do it then, and you're gonna start your fleet transformation now, like John said, you're gonna start paying, you know, market, if not above market kind of prices for the aircraft because there's a shortage of aircraft, especially on the next gen narrow bodies. When you're gonna finance that aircraft because, you know, nobody's gonna pay cash for that aircraft, either if you do it through a financing lease or operating leases, you're gonna be paying the, you know, the interest rates that we're all seeing in the capital markets today, right?
This could, you know, represent an increase of 25% on the monthly lease of a Boeing 737 MAX or an A320neo, right? Compared to what, you know, what we locked in, for example, because we got the majority of our next-gen aircraft when capital was a lot more affordable. Obviously, fleet transformation is a big part. You know, the fuel burn reduction from the fleet transformation is a big part of, you know, increasing our efficiencies, reducing our unit cost. We have to look at the whole organization, right? Fuel is our biggest line item. It was about 35% of our operating expenses pre-pandemic. It's over 50% now because of the higher cost of fuel. Everything we can do to reduce fuel burn represents a big, big cost savings, right?
We're looking at everywhere in the organization to fly more efficiently, right? We're getting rid of paper on the aircraft. We still were carrying in some of our aircraft, a lot of paper manuals, and we got rid of those. We're using, you know, last generation software to optimize our flying. You know, We can fly a lot better. There's an example here that through the use of software and coordinating with air traffic control, the old way that we used to fly from Florianópolis to Campinas and the new way, right? We used to actually have to go essentially to São Paulo first, right? We kinda deviate from the straight line and then cut over and go to Campinas, right? By coordinating with air traffic control, we're eliminating that type of inefficiency.
We're still not flying as the crow flies, but we're getting closer and closer. We're working a lot to do that. You know, with fuel at, you know, BRL 6 a liter, we cannot use the APU, right? The auxiliary power unit they have in the back of the aircraft to maintain the aircraft cool, to provide power. There's a lot cheaper ways to do that with ground power, right? We are deploying ground power units or combos throughout our network to avoid the use of the APU. The APU also has very high maintenance costs, which is paid in dollars, right? If we can avoid that maintenance event for the APU, again, with the BRL at 5.30, it's a big cost saving. There's a lot of initiatives that we're pursuing to reduce fuel burn.
All of them together can add to about BRL 250 million in annual cost reduction, and a huge reduction also in carbon emissions, obviously. This is also something where we're better, you know, today than we were pre-pandemic. Another thing we didn't have during the pandemic, before the pandemic, our hangar, right. We kind of initiated construction at the end of 2018, and now we have the largest hangar in Latin America, which is an asset that's continuously providing benefits and cost savings to us, right. First, we're insourcing essentially everything but engine maintenance we can do inside of our hangar. We avoid ferrying that aircraft to somewhere around the world, right, for that aircraft to be maintained. We're also paying labor of that hangar in reais, right.
When we sent that aircraft to the US to do maintenance in the past, we had to pay for that labor in dollars, right? Huge, huge cost reduction. Also it's great for parking. You know, it's very expensive to park an aircraft at an airport, and this is free parking space because we essentially have all the space, you know, in the hangar and also around the hangar, which is a big cost savings for us as well. All of this together, you know, this. We spent about BRL 150 million to build this hangar. In less than two years we already got a payback on it. This is all about critical mass, right?
If you're big enough, if you have enough volume, it makes sense to have a hangar, and we've gotten to a size where it makes a lot of sense for us to have a hangar like this, and we get very high productivity out of it.
Thanks, Alex. You know, I think, I've been, you know, quoted as saying, and I really believe this, Azul is not an airline. Okay, I know that may be strange. We are not an airline. We're a company of people. We're a giant family that takes care of one another, and I think the passion of our people, you know, drives unbelievable, great results. I'm gonna walk you through what some of those are. You know, there's a saying that many of you have heard that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Azul's culture is very strong, and we're gonna kind of walk you through that. If you take a look at this, once again, comparing where we were in 2019 to where we are in 2022. Look at our NPS score. Customer satisfaction.
It's up significantly, up 7 points in NPS from 2019. This is during a pandemic, people. This is during the time when we asked people to take an unpaid leave of absence. This is during a time when people feared for their jobs. Look at what we've been able to do. If you take a look at Consumidor.gov.br, Reclame Aqui, I encourage each of you to go on their sites and just search how Azul compare to the competition. You'll see our customer complaints are half our next closest competitor. Half our next closest competitor, right? You go into Reclame Aqui, we consistently win their awards. Let's kind of walk through some of the statistics, okay? Azul and the Azul brand, this is our NPS stacked up against some of the best brands worldwide.
You can see Costco, Samsung, Apple, and look at where Azul stands up. That's why I'm so excited about Congonhas. Somebody has the opportunity to fly our brand with our Wi-Fi, with our amazing people on board the aircraft. Why would anybody want to fly anybody else, right? It's just an unbelievably great experience to be with our people, and that's what's so exciting as we move forward.
Just, you know, just to note, because the bar is a little small, you may not notice. The average airline in the world has an NPS in the 20s, right? An NPS in the 60s for an airline, you know, is really remarkable. You know, we grew it from 57, which again was already a very high bar.
You know, Abhi always talks about this. People pay more to fly Azul 'cause we treat them better, right? It's an experience to fly Azul. It's not just flying from Rio to São Paulo, it's an experience. You know, many of you are watching the games, right? You can watch the games on our aircraft, right? It's just an unbelievably great experience to be with our people. Our on-time performance. Okay. Abhi showed you how we've increased our daily flights from about 900 to 1,000. We've spread the network to 168 cities, at the same time, we improved on-time performance. That's a pretty amazing feat overall, if you think about it. How do we compare worldwide? Let's do that because forget locally. How do we compare worldwide?
In March, we're the most on-time airline in the world. We did it again in July. We did it again in August. Every other month, with the exception of January, we were top 5 in the world in on-time performance. When you think about bringing the Azul product to the Congonhas Airport, which is primarily a corporate airport, right? Having a great on-time performance is essential. It's essential for Brazil. Now, I've talked a lot about, you know, the civil lawsuits that exist in Brazil, right? I kinda made a joke that every flight that we lose the bag, you know, it has a wedding dress in it, right? Because, you know, Brazil has 3% of the world's flights, but 85% of the lawsuits, right?
Running an on-time airline makes you a more cost-efficient airline, right? It's essential that we do that. We consistently win kind of the top awards in the industry. An interesting fact, you know, that Abhi likes to remind everybody. The last time Tripadvisor gave an award for the best airline in the world, it was Azul, and it was based on 2019. They stopped giving it because I think we'll just keep winning it, right? They haven't given one since they gave it to us, you know, we are an unbelievable great airline. We're an unbelievable great airline because of our people. You know, I wanna show you the performance of our people, and then I wanna show you a little bit about our people. Our airports are 18% more efficient.
Remember, we're 18% more efficient, and we increased our on-time percentage by 5 points. Okay? Take a look at our call center. Our call center is 17% more efficient. Our cargo department, they are 55% more efficient as they've more than doubled and are on way to triple the cargo revenue and look at the efficiency that they're driving. Take a look at this. This is really important. Every year in the month of October, we do a crew member satisfaction survey. Okay? This is 82% of our people participated in the survey to give us feedback, to tell us how we're doing and take a look at what's happened to favorability inside the airline. Compared to 2019, we're 86% versus 76%. That's while we have a more efficient airline.
That's while we're pushing our people to deliver 1,000 flights a day, while we're flying to 168 destinations. It's a people business, and the people matter. Our greatest asset is not the E2, it's not the A321, it's our people. Our people make a difference. Our people showed you how we're gonna respond to the challenges that we have. I tell you know, any challenge that comes this way, we've managed an airline a full year without revenue because of our great people. Our people matter. If you have the ability to bet on somebody, bet on great people. Our people are the best in the business by far. They stood up... You know, it was interesting, I was in New York, and I was talking to...
I'm not gonna name the fund, but she said, You know, back in 2020, it was April, May of 2020, we started to organize because we were sure you were gonna miss your coupon payment. I said, Don't you remember we had 12,000 people raise their hand to say, 'We're gonna save this airline. That's culture. Culture is really, really important. We invest in it. Our people are not only doing great things inside of Azul, they're doing great things outside of Azul. We have more than 4,000 people that are volunteers. I was in my office last night and somebody came in, and they showed me what they did in Aracaju. They took an organization that had abused children, took them to the airport.
All the airport did it without the knowledge of me, without the knowledge of Alex, Abhi, our President. Nobody knew. The airport in Aracaju said, We're gonna go take care of these young kids. Took them to the airport, opened their eyes that they can dream to be flight attendants, mechanics, pilots. People matter, and we have the greatest people in the world. I think that, you know, I wake up every day, I'm passionate about this country, I'm passionate about our people because we're changing Brazil. We're changing Brazil every single day. I think as you look at Azul, that matters.
You know, every time I go to Brasília, I tell them, I've got 4,000 people that are doing good in the world. Anytime you guys have a problem, we had in Santa Catarina, we had this big mudslide that happened just a week or two ago, right? Azul's there. Azul's there to help because, you know, every Brazilian needs to do their part. I'm very passionate about what Azul has done. We have a lot of fun doing it too. You know, this is our Halloween that happened. You know, this is our entire executive team here that got together. You know, we decided, Hey, we're gonna celebrate Halloween. It's an American holiday. Let's have some fun with it. We did. You could see our people step up, and they love to come to work.
That's why our turnover is at record lows. Our ability to continue growing this business is really crucial to us. You know, I just wanna kinda highlight something here before I turn it over to Abhi, you know, to kind of walk through our business units. Culture matters. If you get anything out of today, culture and people matter. We have a university that many of you have visited. You know, we do more than 50,000 trainings at our, at our university a year. That's where our people get together. They see crew members from other airports. It's one of the greatest places for our culture is our university. We're the only ones in Latin America that has our own university. That's key to kind of who we are.
You know, being a people business, we need to continue to invest in our people. I wanna kind of give you a statistic. We had 1,500 Azul employees were promoted in calendar year 2022. 1,500. What does that mean? That means that somebody starts out as a call center agent, they start out as an airport agent, they're dreaming of being a flight attendant. They're dreaming of being a pilot. They're dreaming of being a supervisor. When you go to the airport, the person that's checking you in at the counter, they're not just an airport agent. They have a career inside of Azul. They have the opportunity to grow. That's why our airports are 20% more efficient, because we only promote the best. They go to work every day thinking about their career inside of Azul.
I have a dream as the CEO of this company that I only wanna promote from within. I told them, I'm not leaving Azul until every single promotion happens internally Every single promotion happens internally because we have the great ability to continue to grow our people. You know, when you have a flight attendant that worked at the airport, she's gonna be a better flight attendant. We have a pilot that was at our call center or worked in our safety team, he's gonna be a better pilot. You have a maintenance technician that came from engineering, they're gonna be a better maintenance technician. You know, the people is our focus, and that's what got us through the toughest times.
That's why, you know, when people say, Jeez, the challenges of currency and fuel. When you have a pilot group that's engaged and loves the company, they're gonna help you save fuel. When you have an airport team that loves the company and is thinking about their future, and they wanna see new aircraft coming, they're gonna help turn aircraft a lot faster. They're gonna help give great customer service. With that, I'll pass it over to Abhi.
Thanks, John. Getting back a little bit to the numbers, talking about the business units. Before, I wanna correct one thing that John said, no one will check you in at the airport, okay? Do it yourself, please, on the app. It's much better and it makes us more efficient. Talking about ancillaries, this has been a really positive point, this year. We've grown ancillary revenue significantly on a per passenger basis. Just to remind everybody, our product is completely unbundled, right? We charge for seat assignments, we charge for baggage, we charge if you wanna obviously change your flight, cancel your flight, all that kind of stuff. That's allowed us over time to really unbundle our product more, add more services, and increase significantly our ancillaries revenue per passenger as well.
It's grown 40% since the pandemic, and we see more growth next year as well. Cargo. We have a couple of our cargo team here. Isabel, our director of cargo, is here. You know, it's just been a really, really great story talking about Azul Cargo. We've talked about it a lot in the past, but the growth continues from 2019 to this year and next year as well. What we are bringing to the cargo market is less cargo, more logistics, right? We just announced Amazon a couple of weeks ago, and what we are doing for Amazon is logistics. It's door-to-door logistics.
We are one of the few, if not the only air logistics operator that will go to the house or the apartment of the seller, take the package all the way through our cargo terminal on our airplanes and deliver it via our last mile partners to the buyer's home, right? That entire chain is what we provide via obviously our scheduled network and our network of partners all around the country. We are the largest air logistics provider in Brazil. We have about a 33%-35% market share. And the way we do it is a combination of scheduled network, 168 destinations, 900-1,000 departures a day, and using a scheduled network, using the belly capacity, which remember, is very, very profitable.
The aircraft is going anyway, the fuel is going anyway, the crew is going anyway. To the marginal cost of putting a 2-kilo package in the belly is very, very low. You can really take advantage of that scale and provide quick delivery times. 66% of our deliveries are within 2 days or less. We deliver to 2,000 cities within 48 hours. That's why someone like Amazon came to us and said, I need you in these cities where I cannot deliver packages so fast. We know the quicker you deliver packages, the more people buy, and that's. This is a virtuous cycle. We have a partnership with 300 partners all around Brazil, serving 4,500 ZIP codes around the country.
They help us with bringing demand, they help us with first mile, and they help us with last mile of delivering. We have a range of products between, you know, industrial, supporting auto manufacturers, pharma, as well as e-commerce with the largest e-commerce players all over Brazil. We have a mix of products from our express services to our standard services. Really what people are looking for is fast deliveries, and that's what we are providing. We are the end-to-end solution, and the middle of that is the scheduled network. We have grown in terms of market share. Again, it's not a target of ours, but it's just been a consequence of the unique product that we deliver.
Most of the growth, this is where we're really excited, is that most of the growth is coming from customers that previously used road, right? They previously used road, and now they're using air. That market is still very, very large. The air logistics market in Brazil is probably BRL 5 billion, and we have about, you know, 33% of it. But the road market that could go to air is BRL 45 billion. It's 15 times. It's much, much larger, right? That's what we're very, very excited about. That's what we are seeing. More than half of our revenue growth is not coming from our competitors. Our market share is not because we've stolen customers from our competitor because they can steal them back. That's easy. That's not sustainable.
It's coming from customers who previously never used air logistics, customers that were shipping via road 7 days, 10 days to Salvador, to Fortaleza, to Belém, and now we get it there in 2 days. Much more reliable, world-class reliability that John talked about, right? Maintaining all the top safety, security standards, and all those kinds of things. This is what we're really excited about, and this is why we believe that the logistics market will continue to grow, and we can capture a large part of that growth. The other business unit that we're talking a lot about lately is Azul Viagens. Chris is here, Danielle as well. They run Azul Viagens for us, and it's just been an absolute blowout year for Azul Viagens.
What happened for Azul Cargo last year has happened for Azul Viagens this year in terms of the growth in the vacation space, in the leisure space. We are the second largest vacations provider in Brazil now, behind CVC. CVC is a lot larger than us, there was this huge vacuum, and we've been able to take a lot of that space. We are the largest vacations provider in several of the key cities in Brazil, like Porto Seguro, for example, and we're just seeing a lot of opportunity. Again, a combination of our regular scheduled network and most interestingly, and this is where I think we bring something very, very different to the table, our dedicated network that we do primarily on weekends. Weekends, as you know, have less corporate demand, have less corporate traffic, so you have aircraft sitting on the ground.
If you put them together with a vacation network like this, you're able to provide high utilization for the airline and a unique service, a unique product for the customer. Just this summer season alone, we'll have 2,000 dedicated flights just for our vacations business. 80% of these routes, they never had service, ever, and we're able to bring that on weekends. Someone in Uberaba, someone in Rio Preto who otherwise have to connect in São Paulo, they can now go nonstop. What's gonna happen? They're gonna go more often. It's not like we're selling these cheap, right? In fact, our average fare on these flights on weekends is higher than the average fare on the other flights, the regular flights on weekends.
Again, as we have done so much in our past, we use the network, we use service, and we use convenience to really grow the network. We're very, very excited. We have a business plan going forward, we're looking at other channels in the vacation space that we think we can significantly grow this revenue. We're very, very excited about what's happening in the vacations business and putting that together, driving incremental traffic, incremental revenue, and incremental earnings to Azul overall. Finally, TudoAzul, and this links very, very well into Congonhas, which we'll get to in a second, but it also having an extremely strong year. Gross billings are up, you know, almost 80%. Record customer engagement. Our customer activity is higher than ever, and they're actually paying more, and I'll show you that in a second.
We've expanded our portfolio, we've expanded our partners, and we've grown our membership. We're now up to 15 million members, and they're actually paying more, right? I don't know if any of you have tried to redeem a ticket in points, but it's expensive, right? We are seeing record customer engagement. Our average redemptions for domestic is up 76%. Our average redemption for international is up huge. People are really using the points plus money option as well. 30% of all of our loyalty redemptions include the points plus money, which is a nice way to make loyalty accessible. If you don't have enough points, you use a little bit of money to make that a little bit more accessible. Here's the international, right? It's double, you know.
We're over 100,000 points per person per each direction on one of our international, on average, one of our international redemptions to the U.S. or Europe. We're seeing very, very strong customer engagement. Our bank transfers are very, very strong. Our B2C program, which is our club and the credit card. The credit card has been a really standout success over the last 18 months. What's really, really cool about our credit card is that 35% of our Itaú card emissions are Platinum or Infinity, right? Which is the high end of the range. As you think about now, you know, credit and customer credit, we are actually insulated a little bit from that because these customers are not nearly as impacted.
Even though you might see a tightening of personal credit in Brazil, what we are seeing actually is the spend on our credit cards is increasing. The spend on our credit cards is increasing. Of all the spend that customers are doing in total on the credit card and on the travel sector, 75% is on Azul. If you ask our partner, Itaú, the customer loyalty within our credit card is one of the highest, if not the highest. Very, very loyal customers. When they spend their credit cards on travel, they do it on Azul. A great demographics in terms of customers. They continue to spend, they continue to travel. We're actually seeing our gross billings from the credit card business increase every month, even though we are seeing a slight tightening of the credit sector overall.
Very, very strong demographics. We have a great set of partners that we're adding all the time, from the banks to retail and also international partners. Again, this is a quiet development, but we have a very, very unique product when it comes to loyalty redemptions, not just for Azul, but for international travel. You can travel within Europe if you want. From Lisbon to Paris, you can buy a ticket using points. You can travel within South America, like Buenos Aires, you can travel, even though Azul doesn't even fly there, but you can do it via our partners on the loyalty side. We're actually building out a really great portfolio of partners and different ways for our customers to use their points.
A little bit of a segue into São Paulo and Congonhas. This is what gets us excited, why John is so excited about Congonhas, is that Azul is still small in São Paulo, right? Everything that we have achieved, we've done it primarily outside São Paulo. That's been great because it's all been unexplored. Campinas had 10 total departures when we started. Now we alone have 200, right? Places like Cuiabá, places like Belo Horizonte, like Recife, all unexplored to the extent that we have done it. We still remain relatively small in São Paulo. Our presence in Congonhas until the end of March, small. São Paulo as well. Again, that's been part of our network strategy. As a result, only 10% of our loyalty members come in São Paulo, right? Which again, is not surprising given our network.
As we look ahead, as we look ahead into what we're now gonna be able to offer, towards the end of March of next year, we're already selling tickets for our 84 slots, right? You can go online, you can buy it. By the end of March, customers will now be able to experience the Azul product, the Azul network, and that's gonna drive significant, we believe, customer engagement and loyalty program in terms of members, in terms of credit cards, in terms of the club. This is a huge opportunity we have. Our network in Congonhas is going to be six nonstop cities, the six largest markets. Even more exciting is great connectivity all over the country, reaching 90 cities via connections, 38 of them that have no service today to Congonhas, right?
We are bringing a new aspect as well, a new connectivity. Here's what you can see in terms of our, the network, what it's gonna be. We're very, very excited. The tickets are on sale now. We start flying at the end of March. You know, we're really, really excited to show the São Paulo customer, get them into the Universe, get them into our Universe, then they will get access and get exposure to all of the other different products that we have to sell. We're huge upside for us going forward. Looking ahead to 2023.
Thanks, Abhi. What does this all mean, right? Obviously, if everything's doing great and everything's better than 2019, we need to be more profitable than we were in 2019, and we will be, right? In spite of all the challenges that John mentioned, fuel price doubling, the real devaluing, lower corporate demand, we're confident that we will deliver an EBITDA higher than BRL 5 billion in 2023. Our record EBITDA up to this point has been BRL 3.6 billion in 2019. Obviously, with everything that's helping, if we're better on every single metric, that means that, you know, we absolutely need to be more profitable. We're gonna tell you a little bit of why we're confident that that number is achievable, right?
You know us, we like to underpromise and overdeliver, so the level of confidence on this BRL 5 billion is high. You know, why are we gonna get there? I mean, 2022, you know, we thought that we were gonna get higher than BRL 3.6 billion originally because of everything that's going well, and that's been better than 2019, right? Mainly because of Omicron and fuel, we're not gonna get there. If we just essentially annualize the conditions that we're seeing today, right? We take the fuel price, like John mentioned, it dropped almost 20% just in the last week. You look at the forward curve that we have next year, you know, we're confident that fuel is gonna be lower. We're increasing fares. Fares are already higher.
We have Congonhas, which we didn't have in 2019, didn't have in 2022, not to the extent that we will have in 2023. The continued growth in our business units and the efficiency, you know, we are confident that we can bring the 2022 EBITDA that we're gonna deliver this year to above 5% in 2023, right? Going up kind of quickly, kinda item by item, right? This is the fuel curve for 2022, right? As you see, we went from about BRL 4 per liter in the beginning of the year to over BRL 6, right? As the fuel curve is today, we expect the average fuel price that we pay in 2023 to be about 10% lower than the average that we pay in 2022.
There's gonna be a little bit of a timing issue here on the quarters, right. As you can see, you know, we're gonna have a tough comp here in the first quarter, right. For the full year, by using this to forecast our budget for next year, you know, we're confident on a huge reduction in fuel expense.
Hey, Alex, if I could just add, you know, we're forecasting fuel next year to be between BRL 6 billion and BRL 7 billion. A 10% move is BRL 600 million-BRL 700 million of EBITDA that drops directly to the bottom line, okay? Just in the last month alone, it was BRL 1.4 billion from where it was because fuel's down 20% from where it was at the beginning of November, right? We're heavily levered here, and this is a significant move that I think the market has not picked up on, is just the impact of our fuel expense going into 2023 relative to where it was this year.
Look at where we were in 2019, right? If we're confident that we're gonna get hundreds of millions of BRL by just going from this line to this line, but compared to actually what we've done to offset this level of swing here in fuel price, right? This again shows the strength of the business, right? When we look at average fares, right, you may be thinking, oh, the reason why you're gonna get to BRL 5 billion is because you're projecting some crazy high average fare for 2023. Again, we like to be conservative. Essentially, all we're doing is we're not gonna have Omicron, right? So the average fare increase in Q1 from 2022 to 2023 is gonna be huge because Q1 2022 was horrible. It's not that we're expecting fares to increase another 20%.
We're only expecting about a 4% increase from Q4, the X rate is what's important, right? What we're seeing today in Q4 2022, we're actually expecting a decrease into Q1 of 2023. That's our assumption, right? That's the conservative assumption that we have in our model makes us feel confident that this is highly achievable, right? Again, all we're doing is saying we're gonna have a normal year without Omicron, right? We're essentially annualizing the conditions that we're seeing today. A lot of people ask, you know, what's Congonhas EBITDA, right? How much is that going to add, right? We don't give kinda separate guidance market by market, you can just do some mental accounting. Yeah, you know, Congonhas is gonna represent about 10% of our departures, right? It used to be about half of that, right?
We're essentially adding about 5% capacity. I mean, if Congonhas had average profitability throughout our whole network, it would be an incremental BRL 250 million of EBITDA, right? That's just some rough math if you assume that the average profitability in Congonhas is the same as the whole network. Obviously, the average profitability here is much higher, right? We're talking again about hundreds of millions of BRL in incremental EBITDA by expanding capacity in Congonhas, right? Business units, right? They've grown a lot. Azul airplane. We've grown a lot in all of our business units, but they haven't exhausted their growth potential, right? We believe TudoAzul can grow another 22%. These business units should all grow more than Azul, right? Because they all have their separate reason to grow more than Azul.
TudoAzul, because we're way below our fair share. We didn't have Congonhas, right? We know that as we increase our presence in Congonhas, TudoAzul will benefit significantly. Same thing with cargo. Abhi mentioned, you know, the total surface cargo market in Brazil is almost BRL 300 billion a year, right? You take out everything that doesn't fly, like, you know, soy and iron ore and coffee, everything that's short distance, where, you know, flying is not competitive. You go from BRL 300 billion to BRL 45 billion. We think that's a very conservative assumption, we're only, you know, BRL 1 billion, a billion and a half today, right? We can easily double, triple that business, we're assuming also higher growth in Azul Cargo than Azul overall. Same thing with Azul Viagens, right? There's a lot of untapped potential here.
You know, a lot of new ways of doing business, new markets, new routes that haven't been served before, like Abhi mentioned. We're gonna do everything more efficiently as well, right? We're more productive at airports. We're more productive at the call center. We're more productive throughout the entire organization, which helps us to reduce costs. The fleet transformation that we mentioned also helps us, you know, reduce unit costs because some E1s will be going away and will be replaced by E2s and A220neos in 2023. By adding these blocks, we're very confident that, you know, the BRL 5 billion is achieved. There's always what's outside of our control, right? Things that were outside of our control prevented us from delivering the EBITDA that we would've liked in 2022.
you know, as far as we can see, you know, we're going into a very favorable environment in, 2023.
Hey, Alex, if I could just kinda talk about 2022 quickly. You know, we had a 2 billion BRL move in fuel prices basically overnight as the war in Ukraine came and pushed up the crack spread. What happens when that is that you need to get fares up, and you need to get fuel efficiency up as well, and it took Abhi a quarter or two to get there, right? As you take a look at our exit rate, we did about 1 billion BRL in EBITDA. We're gonna do about 1 billion BRL in EBITDA in the fourth quarter, right? Our exit rate is 4 billion BRL, okay? You take the fuel off 10%, you put Congonhas in there, you grow the other businesses, you can see just how levered this is to go for that five-plus going forward, right?
That's assuming we get no help on the currency, we get no more help on the fuel curve, and, you know, it's just because our exit rate this year is so strong for all of the things we did to improve the business overall.
Right. What does that mean to the valuation of the company, right? Which is, you know, what we're talking about here on Investor Day, right? We still have a very depressed multiple from what we had in 2019, right? This is, you know, very sort of, you know, unlike and very desynchronized from everything that's happening in the business itself. Why do we think that happens, right? What is the market not seeing? What is it not understanding? Why are we seeing these valuations that are so depressed given that we're very confident we can deliver a BRL 5 billion-plus EBITDA next year? I think a lot of it is cash, right? Let's talk about cash and how we've been addressing the cash problem and how we're gonna address it in 2023, right?
Where does the cash problem come from? It essentially comes from the fact that obviously we were hit by the pandemic, right? This upper line was what we thought we were gonna have in terms of revenue between 2019 and, you know, 2023, and the lower line is what we actually had. When you do the math, this is essentially a $20 billion hit to cash, right? You know, how did other airlines? Every airline went through this around the world. How did they address it? The majority of them addressed it through government help, right? Every American carrier, every European carrier they would compete with, you know, received billions of dollars in loans and grants, which we didn't have access to, right?
A lot of airlines in Latin America resorted to Chapter 11, right, and applied a huge haircut to their credits, right, to the money that they owed, and forced people to become, you know, shareholders, that's how they addressed that gap. We didn't pursue those routes, right? We didn't think those routes. Obviously, we wanted government support. We didn't get it. We didn't think Chapter 11 was a solution was necessary. How did we address it, right? We've been addressing it by expanding margins and rolling forward the money that we owe, right? The good news is that that cash gap, right? This cash gap we calculated as EBITDA minus all of the cash outflows that we have. Rent, CapEx, interest, debt amortization, and deferral repayments, right?
Assuming no financing, this is the cash gap that we had every year since the pandemic. BRL 7 billion in 2020, BRL 5 billion, BRL 4 billion this year. The good news is this is our lowest cash gap since the beginning of the pandemic. In 2024, we expect no cash gap, right? We expect to be break-even or positive cash flow. This is the last BRL 3 billion of the BRL 20 billion that we need to manage through. We've already addressed 85% of the problem, right? We can see the finish line. We addressed a BRL 7 billion cash gap when my EBITDA was 0. We addressed this year, right? You can say, Well, that was pandemic.
Everybody was helping everybody in the pandemic. This year, we addressed a four and a half billion BRL cash gap with an EBITDA of, you know, a little over BRL 3 billion. We need to address a lower gap with much higher EBITDA, much higher revenues. Why is everybody worried? Why is it, you know, why isn't our valuation reflecting it, right? Again, this is the total cash impact. This is what we've addressed. This is our remaining cash gap for 2023, right? We've been de-leveraging, we've been managing through the process, you know, without doing a new capital increase. We went from a leverage of about three point something pre or prior to the pandemic. It shot up to, you know, double digits because the EBITDA got really depressed.
We promised we would end 2022 with a leverage starting with a 5. We already delivered that at the end of Q3. We're gonna still be below 6, starting with a 5 at the end of Q4.
We did that without reaching our BRL 4 billion EBITDA, right? I think that's also important. It kinda shows you that what we gave you was a more conservative approach at the start of the year to ensure that we hit the leverage number that we committed to.
If you do the math, with our BRL 5 billion EBITDA, we can definitely hit the guidance of lower than 5, you know, starting with a 4 next year. We're organically de-leveraging, which should also translate into a higher ability to finance ourselves, right? You know, again, why is maybe the market worried? I think maybe the market assumes that we have no access to the capital markets, which may be a fair assumption, right? The markets are very volatile. The bond that we issued at 7.5% yield is trading at, you know, high teens, right? Obviously, that's not a cost of capital that we're willing to pay. We don't need to use the capital markets to address our cash need.
We already had a BRL four and a half billion problem in 2022 without access to the capital markets. We managed through that gap, right? How did we do it? We did it through new lines with local banks, right? We did it by rolling over the debt that was maturing. If you have a good business, your creditor actually doesn't want you to pay down your debt, right? If the bank knows that you're able to pay your bank, they actually want that bank to that debt to live on forever because they want to earn that interest, right? We were able to roll over our debt. We were able to do some supplier financing. All of those options that we used in 2022 are still available to us in 2023.
All of the banks, all of the local banks that we have much lower exposure to Azul than they did even prior to when we went public, right? We're a very, you know, solid business, so they can earn a nice return, you know, without running risks. We have a lot of other options as well. Out of that BRL 3 billion cash gap, almost BRL 2.5 billion is maintenance CapEx, right? All of our CapEx is maintenance CapEx. We don't have any CapEx coming from new aircraft because those aircraft are already financed. If you have two and a half billion reais of maintenance CapEx, we believe we can easily get BRL 1 billion of financing for that CapEx, right? It's a very small portion of the total CapEx that we are spending.
You know, we've done negotiations with lessors before, but it was under sort of a much more dire situation. Now we can do negotiations with lessors from a much more commercial standpoint. We can offer them things that are attractive to them and get in exchange deferrals which are attractive to us. We have a lot of unencumbered assets that we can also leverage, right? Let's talk about lessors and the unencumbered assets.
Hey, Alex, if you'll allow me, 'cause I was in New York and talking to, you know, a lot of fixed income investors, they ask the question often, 'But the aircraft market is hot, you know?' If the operating lessors were concerned about Azul risk, the first thing they would do is not add to Azul risk, right? I mean, that's the number 1 thing you do. Our top lessors have delivered new aircraft to us in the last 60 days. You can kind of see that they've increased their exposure in Azul because they believe in the business model. We've got great partners because of how we managed through the pandemic in a huge contrast to how others managed through the pandemic. They saw we didn't get government aid. They saw that we chose not to file for Chapter 11.
When they're delivering a brand-new A320neo to us in the month of December, they're taking more exposure. Equity investors could buy and sell our stock on a daily basis. Fixed income people could buy and sell our debt on a daily basis. A sell side analyst can upgrade us or downgrade us on a daily basis. When someone takes an aircraft and puts it inside of Azul, they're taking a 10 to 12 year risk on our business. They've been fantastic partners of ours. They believe in our business model. They see all the work that we've done, we have unbelievably great partners. What is the conversation with our leasing partners today? We had an agreement that was in 2022, we would pay flat rent, okay?
Then that would be the year that we got our nose above water, okay. Then in 2023, we would start paying some of the back rent that they helped us with during the pandemic. The lessors nor us knew that Omicron would impact 2022. Nobody knew that there would be a war in Ukraine. That year that we were supposed to be get our nose above the water was impacted by that BRL 2 billion increase in fuel prices. What most likely happens is we continue to pay full rent to our lessors, and we probably just push off some of those deferrals into the future as we continue to grow our EBITDA above BRL 5 billion.
They've been great partners, and they've been with us through the darkest of times, and now the sun is starting to shine, and they're with us as we move forward. It's really important to understand that they are long-term stakeholders and partners in our business.
Right. Think about it. These lessors that gave us aircraft in 2022, these aircraft are gonna stay at Azul until 2034, right? That's a big commitment. That's a big sign of confidence that they're doing. If you take our seven lessors, they represent 75% of our fleet, right? That's one of the reasons why we were confident that we didn't need to have a rupture, right? You just have to sit down and negotiate with seven, eight, 10 good partners that have, you know, a big level of confidence in Azul, so much that they have been increasing that exposure to us, right? That's obvious, right? They know the business is solid, right? They know the business is solid. We have a liquidity issue, which is only 15% of the total liquidity issue that we've addressed.
They can look at the last three years and see how we've managed through that cash gap and be comfortable that we have the ability to manage through the last remaining portion of that cash gap. We have a lot of unencumbered assets, right? We talked about the business units, which are all unencumbered. We have our TAP bond, right? Since the pandemic, the only assets that we encumbered were a little bit of our spare parts and our hangar in Viracopos and our IP, which is securing the convertible debenture that we issued in October of 2020, right? Everything else is unencumbered. Everything else has actually increased in value since 2019, right? Because if TudoAzul grew since 2019, that means it's got more revenue, it's got more EBITDA, and it's got a higher valuation than it had in 2019.
Same thing with Azul Cargo, same thing with Viagens. Even our TAP bond, which is priced in euros, you know, the hit that we had on the devaluation of the real increases the value of the TAP bond in reais. Every unsecured asset that we have is more valuable today than it was in 2019, which gives us again, that ability to finance ourselves. Well, overall, you can see that we're better on every dimension that's under our control, right? We talked about traffic. We talked about fares. Total revenue is higher. We talked about costs, right? We're burning less fuel. We are a more productive airline than we were. All of our business units are knocking it out of the park, growing, expanding margins. We're adding Congonhas, which we didn't have.
It's just every level that you can see we're doing better today than we were in 2019.
Yeah. Thanks, Alex. You know, I think I often get the question, you know, Why are you still here? We've been at this for 14+ years. It's the passion of our lives, what we're doing here. If you were to tell me in 2019, forget the pandemic, that you'd more than double in Congonhas, that Abhi would increase his fares 45%, that our business units would essentially all triple compared to where they were in 2019. Our airports would be 20% more efficient, our call center 15% more efficient. I mean, why wouldn't you wanna be here, right? Challenges, every business has challenges, right? Look at how we've gone through these challenges. You know, we like this, you know, this a little bit of this before and after.
You know, This is our before, and you're kind of stuck with the same people after, right? We've all aged a bit, but we're all here because we all believe in the business. This is our business, and we're gonna continue to fight through the challenges, right? You know, Alex says that, wow, we've been hit with a lot of hard things, right? Fuel, you know, devaluation of the currency, all those things. Stop for a second. What we wanted to spend our time with you today was look at everything that has improved. Everything that is in the control of our management team and our more than 13,500 people, we have improved overall. I just wanna kind of remind everybody of kind of what we've done.
You know, leader in customer satisfaction, most on-time airline in the world, the business unit's growing. We're going forward into a year where we have tailwinds of lower fuel prices, a significant increase in our presence in the Congonhas Airport. All of these things will not only lead us to the BRL 5 billion of EBITDA that we're gonna get to in 2023, but as you project forward, 2023, I don't even have a full year of Congonhas. I don't even have a full year of growing my other business units. I'm taking aircraft E2s throughout 2023. As I look forward, what does this business look like as we move into 2024, 2025? Let's not forget, in 2019, our EBITDA margins were 31%. BRL 5 billion of EBITDA next year is about 25%. We're not content with where we are in 2023.
We believe as we've improved every single measure in the business, and the fares are taking care of the fuel, and the fares are taking care of the currency going forward, that why shouldn't we be marching towards 30+% EBITDA margins again, even with the more challenging macro scenarios. Folks, we run an unbelievably great business, and this great business is not only good for U.S. investors and, but it's also good for Brazil. These are a lot of the things that we do to kind of help support Brazil overall. We talked a lot about, you know, the 4,500, you know, crew members that are volunteers, the more than 13,000 direct jobs that we provide. You know, think of Embraer without Azul, right? The importance of Embraer in this country without Azul.
You know, think about the north of this country, think about the Amazon region without Azul, as we launched five new cities yesterday alone. You know, Azul is doing fantastic things. We appreciate you coming here, and we're gonna spend the next half an hour with you answering any questions that you may have.
Hey, John. Thank you. Josh Milberg from Morgan Stanley. Thank you very much for the event. My first question was just related to your indication that you would get to cash break even in 2024. I was just wondering if you could sort of share some of the key assumptions behind that expectation in terms of EBITDA, in terms of payments to lessors, in terms of interest costs, CapEx.
Yeah. You know, let's talk about the outflows first. The outflows stay fairly equal, right? You know, they stay fairly equal to 2022 as well. Let's start with rent, right? Our normal rent is sort of, you know, between rent and aircraft finance leases, it's about BRL 3.5 billion. There's about BRL 600 million of deferred rents that we start paying in 2023. We already paid about BRL 600 million of deferred rent in 2022 related to the second wave negotiation, right? We did a first wave negotiation, which we start paying in 2023, we did a second wave negotiation, which we started paying in 2022. Rent is not gonna go up, 2022, 2023, 2024, essentially the same.
CapEx, like I said, in the kinda BRL 2 billion-BRL 2.5 billion, same number in 2022, 2023, 2024. Interest is essentially the same, right? Most of our interest is.
Hey, John. Hey, let me just add one thing there, Alex, before you get there. We just finished our budget. We have a board meeting tomorrow. That's why we're confident about the BRL 5 billion and obviously going forward, you know, as you go into 2023. One thing that was really interesting that Alex talks about is our CapEx. We saw that 70% of our maintenance cost is on our old gen aircraft, right? You know, even though it's only producing, you know, about 20% of our ASKs in 2023, you know, that starts to drop off very quickly as those aircraft go away.
You know, interest stayed fairly flat also because most of our interest is the fixed coupon on our two unsecured bonds. We don't have a lot of, you know, we have no kind of Fed funds related or index financing, very little CDI index financing, and the CDI today is already, I think, pretty much where the market expects it to be. Debt amortizations actually go down a little bit. We have some debt that matures. You know, the hedge loss that we had from oil in the beginning of the pandemic will mature 100% by the end of 2023. 2024, debt maturities actually come down a little bit. The big improvement that you see from 2023 to 2024 is again on EBITDA, right? Some of it is secured, you know, less debt amortization, less.
Less, supplier financing, right? You know, because we're paying down every year. The cash gap that we have is not a cash gap from the operation. The operation very early in the pandemic became cash positive, right? The cash has been going to pay for rent, to pay for debt, to pay for deferral. We've been deleveraging throughout the time. The cash flow breakeven essentially comes from higher EBITDA, lower debt amortizations, and lower supplier deferrals. Obviously, that doesn't include the unsecured bonds, right? That assumes that the unsecured bonds get addressed.
Josh, we're growing with next-gen aircraft throughout 2023. Now we'll have the full year of 2024 with those next-gen aircraft producing more revenue as we exit more of the old generation aircraft. Every new E2 is higher gauged, which produces more revenue overall.
Okay. Very much appreciate all of that color. If I may, a second question was more on the competitive operational side. You guys have very much had that consistent message of the market being quite disciplined, and certainly all the players have a kind of keen interest in it staying as such. Could you talk a little bit about what you're seeing with LATAM's emergence from Chapter 11, a little bit maybe touching on that airline's cost competitiveness with the cash fleet cost reductions that they achieved during the pandemic. Do you see any risk to that sort of like favorable dynamic remaining in place as we head into 2023?
Let me talk to the cost structure and their process, then I'll have Abhi kind of talk to the network side. You know, there wasn't a labor deal that was done during their bankruptcy, right? Their fleet, they have one NEO flying in Brazil today. They need to kind of put 100 NEOs into the market, right? The cost of capital of those NEOs going forward. You know, Josh, you look at their CASK, compare their CASK to our CASK. I challenge you to do that, right? Then you take a look at that's our all-in CASK flying ATRs, E-jets and A320s, right? I think we're very well-positioned overall. Their exit financing came out at a very high cost of capital, right? You know, 13% that they're paying on that.
I think they're going to run a good business overall, and I think their shareholders wanna run a business for profit. I think that's really essential as we go forward. As I look at it, you know, they didn't come out with a lower cost of capital than they went in. They're about as levered as they went in. I think as I look at GOL, TAM, Azul, everybody needs to make money, right? It's not like, oh, I went through bankruptcy, so now I can go waste a bunch of money going forward. Everybody needs to make money, and the higher cost of capital going forward and the less amount of next-gen aircraft in the fleet means who needs higher fuel prices or who needs higher, you know, fares? Azul or somebody that has fewer next-gen aircraft, right?
I think there's been a very good disciplined market that Abhi will walk you through, but I think we feel very good about our competitiveness because, as I showed you, without bankruptcy, I'm 20% more efficient at my airports. I'm, you know, 17% more efficient in, across the entire kind of spectrum. I think that, you know, bankruptcy was a tool they used, but they still need to refleet themselves, and that didn't happen yet. I think that that's going to kinda add to their cost structure going forward.
Yeah, Josh, I mean, I'm a big believer in the discipline continuing. You know, as John said, I agree. I don't think any airline has the luxury of messing around, right? Nor the motivation, right? I mean, we've got record high average fares. Why would you wanna go backwards? The customer is king, you know. I also see on the network side, airlines focusing where they are strong. I see GOL focusing in Congonhas and Guarulhos and Brasília and Salvador, and I see LATAM focusing in São Paulo and Brazil and where they are strong and not that much interaction or overlap. What we are able to see, in fact, we just saw some capacity from LATAM for April, you know, they're focusing again where they are strong, and that's what we have done, right?
I mean, our departures in Guarulhos went from 50 to 18, right? We decided that in the pandemic and post-pandemic, we're gonna focus in our network, and we're gonna, you know, do our part to keep that discipline, which is also where it gets the best results. I think that even if you look at fuel prices coming down, fares lately, I think the industry has taken fare increases at the right time, you know, frequently and at the right times in response to the cost pressures. I continue to believe that that discipline is gonna be good.
Thanks very much.
Thanks. Hey, guys. Good morning. It's Lucas Marquiori from BTG Pactual. Two questions on my side regarding the roadmap towards the BRL 5 billion EBITDA for next year. First, regarding the corporate or at least traffic mix towards next year, how much of this increase in traffic relies on catching up on corporate traveling and international travel so we can kind of understand what's the challenge behind for you guys to go after these traffic increase? Secondly, John, regarding these 80-plus slots in Congonhas, how much of this is already secured by the airport privatization owner, or how much of this is still reliable on maybe government negotiations? We know we have a new team in town, right? How much of this is still kind of on the decks to be negotiated, right? Those two questions.
Yeah. Thanks. On corporate demand, you know, we're right now at about 85% volume, 85%-88% volume. Average fares are 40%-50% higher, about 125%-130% revenue. We actually don't need much more than that to hit these numbers. In fact, the unit revenue that we have for next year is basically 3Q and 4Q of this year, just the whole year.
The reason that 1Q, the jump is so big because our 1Q got destroyed this year because of Omicron, right? Where we had to cancel a third of our network, basically. What we're assuming is we are adding capacity, you know, domestically about mid to high single digits of capacity. We wanna keep our unit revenues flat to what we have today. Anything additional that comes in terms of corporate recovery will actually be a bonus. As Congonhas, I can answer that as well. We have the 84 slots. They are ours, historical rights. We are selling them, it's done.
I'll just add on Congonhas, you know, they decided to revisit the rule under the Temer government. It wasn't even a Bolsonaro government when they kinda set the slots aside, and they did a public hearing on it. You know, this is the new rule, not only for Congonhas, but for all airports in Brazil. I think that that's, you know, something that's great overall. You know, whether the government's a Bolsonaro government, a PT government, look at what Azul does for the country, right? That connected-connectivity of 90 cities that we serve that nobody else is serving, right? That's crucial to any government that's in power, and I think it's been, you know, unjust for a long time, right? You know, we have 1/3 of the Brazilian market, but 4% of Congonhas, right?
There's so many cities as you look in, you know, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul that didn't have connectivity to the Congonhas Airport simply because Azul didn't fly there, right? You know, I think given that, there's so many people in the entire country that benefit from Azul having more slots in the airport, especially the people in Brasília, 'cause we're gonna have seven flights a day to Brasília, and they're gonna be able to have Wi-Fi for free, and they're also gonna be able to watch, you know, if they wanna watch Globoplay, they can do that. If they wanna watch Globo, they can do that. If they wanna watch CNN, they can do that. They watch whatever they want. You know, 'cause we have that on board our aircraft.
Thank you. Bruno Amorim from Goldman Sachs. Good morning. It seems that as you mentioned, that the industry is moving in the right direction, right? Everybody's raising prices to offset higher costs and so on. It seems to be a matter of time for margins to go back to pre-pandemic levels. However, during the pandemic, the industry, including Azul, you know, you guys have been burning cash, which means that the balance sheets will be heavier on the debt side post-pandemic. How do you intend to address that? Should we assume, you know, you guys will run with higher leverage post-pandemic? Is it something you're concerned about? Your thoughts would be highly appreciated. Thank you.
I think as you saw, you know, our leverage will be maybe, you know, kind of 0.6, 0.7 higher than we were pre-pandemic in the end of 2024, right? We call that a tie, right? You add another year, then we're back to the leverage that we had pre-pandemic. I mean, it wasn't a really big problem of debt because, you know, we didn't get any debt from the government. You know, we've been getting support mainly from our lessors and suppliers, and we've been paying back our lessors and suppliers, right? The operation generates a lot of cash. When you compare the leverage, right, where does it come from, you know, 2019 into 2024, the net debt is not that different.
Sure, it went up a little bit, but, I mean, compared to what happened in the pandemic, it's not that big of a problem. The EBITDA will compensate, and we'll get back there. That's assuming no follow-on. Obviously, we'll always try to get the most efficiently priced capital that's available to us. If that most efficiently priced capital is an unsecured bond, we'll do that. If it's a secured bond, we'll do that. If it's a convert, if it's a follow-on, whatever it is. Right now, you know, when we say we have no access to the capital markets, is that we think that the cost of capital that we see on the screen makes no sense, right? We're a much better airline today than we were when we issued the 2026 bond in June of last year.
You know, has the cost of capital gone up? Sure, right? Even if you adjust for that, you know, our bond that we issued at 7.5% should be trading below 10, right? Like I said, it's in the high teens. We think that the market is nervous, maybe because it doesn't know where, you know, interest rates in the U.S. are gonna end up. Is there going to be a recession in the U.S.? You know, how are we gonna address the BRL 3 billion? All that's gonna get solved, right? We will address the BRL 3 billion. We, you know, at some point, we will know where interest rates in the U.S. are gonna level off.
I think that at that time, the capital markets may be pricing the Azul risk in a way that's more, I think, consistent with our view. At that time, I think it makes sense for us to consider. We're not assuming that we're gonna be more highly levered. We will temporarily, as we have been for the last three years, but we won't be permanently.
You know, I think one thing that I would highlight is that all airlines in the world are more levered today than they were pre-pandemic, even the ones that were bailed out by their respective governments. If you take a look at all the U.S. carriers are more levered today than they were. We're in that. I think as valuations, they have to kind of take that into consideration in kind of moving forward and looking at, you know, what people are gonna deliver in terms of EBITDA in 2023, 2024 and 2025. You know, I think we've got the best story out there, right? I think there's very few that are gonna be able to uptick their EBITDA as much as Azul will, and that's assuming currency stays where it is, fuel stays where it is, right?
You know, I think we have a lot of things in our favor going forward.
Thank you.
Victor from Bradesco BBI. I have two questions here. Alex, the first one is related to Congonhas. You mentioned that EBITDA Congonhas could be as a minimum of BRL 250 million. If you think about corporate travelers and lower CASK because of the news, can we assume that actually EBITDA Congonhas can be materially higher? The second one is related to United and JetBlue. Is there any kind of negotiation for one of these companies to inject money at Azul? If you think about their network in the U.S., apparently United is in a disadvantage if we compare with JetBlue.
Yes. Well, in Congonhas, I mean, we, you know, nobody gives out sort of, you know, airport profitability or route profitability. That's a kind of very strategic information. I just wanted to kind of do the exercise of what the incremental value of Congonhas could be. I think, you know, the answer is yes, right? I mean, conservatively speaking, assuming average margins, you get to at least BRL 250, but it's gotta be a lot more than that, because certainly the margins in Congonhas are not average, right? That's why we've been fighting 14 years to increase our presence here.
Victor, there's a halo effect about Congonhas, right? When someone starts to fly us to Brasília, they're now gonna think about flying us to Fort Lauderdale, to Orlando, to Lisbon, to, you know, experience our entire network. They're gonna get our credit card. They're gonna enter into TudoAzul. There's, you know, the overall effect of being relevant in Congonhas is really important. Obviously he's giving a more conservative approach to it. You have to also remember, we only have 9 months in 2023 with Congonhas, and every day we'll grow with that presence going forward.
Yeah, regarding the partners, you know, right now we're, as I showed you know, both on the airline side and the loyalty side, we are all the time more relevant to airlines flying to Brazil and us flying abroad. We're actually enjoying that flexibility right now, being able to de-deepen the partnership, you know, with JetBlue, growing with United. We're talking to everybody, you know, and we're keeping our options open at this time. Right now, in effect, I think we'll announce a new co-chair today, I think. We're actually excited about adding to that portfolio, making Azul more relevant.
I think that we used to be sort of forgotten at GOL and LATAM first, then GOL did a great job of capturing that demand and being ahead of us, but I think slowly we've been able to capture some of that demand, and we are now more and more important. Right now we're enjoying having the flexibility. You know, we're talking to everybody, and we'll see what the best options are.
You know, Victor, don't forget, you know, capital, whether it comes from anybody, has strings attached to it, right? You know, I, I think that whether you get capital from United, American, you know, they have their conditions, and if you get capital from, you know, the fixed income world, they have their conditions as well. What Abi's saying is kind of being free and being able to connect our network, you know, you can see what he's been able to do. He's essentially doubled the fares internationally going into Florida. That's powerful, right? Because of the connectivity that he has, and that's probably worth a lot more to us than a one-off transaction.
As you saw, you know, when we listed sort of the many avenues that are available to us to finance our cash gap in 2023, we didn't include money from any kind of commercial negotiation there, right? If it makes sense, if we can get to an agreement, there's upside there, but we're not assuming that that is necessary for us to address the cash gap.
Hi, Alberto Valerio from UBS BB. Thank you, Abhi, John, and Alex for the presentation. My question is about capacity. You mentioned that your old generation aircraft is running at 10 hours block. I imagine that we have some idle capacity, not just in Azul, but also in the system. What should we expect of a capacity addition for next year?
Yeah, thanks. So overall next year, we'll be in the low double digits, but low, right? So low teens, if you will, overall. Domestically, we'll be in the mid to high single digits. We're gonna have more international growth next year than domestic growth. The reason is that our domestic network came first in the recovery, so the base is already higher. Our international recovery is coming just right now. End of this year, we're adding some more capacity. We're starting Recife to Fort Lauderdale early next year. It's more just that coming year round. You're right, there is opportunity on utilization, but utilization has to be managed also with fuel price, right? As the fuel price goes up, the way you manage capacity is by utilization, right?
Every airplane is flying at 8:00 A.M. on Monday morning. Utilization comes on weekends, utilization comes at night, utilization comes by stretching out the day, where then the variable cost of fuel has more of an impact. There is some. As fuel is coming down, there is utilization opportunity, yes. The bulk of our growth next year is gonna be international, just the recovery of international. I would say double digits, low double digits, low teens, double digits overall growth, mid to high single digits domestic growth.
Hey, Abhi, if I could just add, the departures are like 3%, 4%, right? It's the upgauging that exists by taking the E2s over the E1s, retiring the E1s and taking A320neos and A321s. Upgauging even of our international traffic overall, right? You know, the A350s, those are all they're more densified aircraft which have lower economics. When you think about when we're kinda doing our budgeting and our planning with our airports team, for our airports team, we're only growing 3%, 4%, right? In terms of departures. Obviously, they have to then drive efficiency from there. You know, those overall ASKs numbers, that'll help Abhi drive more revenue 'cause he has more seats to sell, but it's not necessarily more departures.
Thank you.
Good morning. Thank you for the great presentation. Juan Lorenzo from Jefferies. I have a question regarding one of the ancillary business opportunities, specifically the TudoAzul program. One of the numbers that I thought was actually interesting was the 1.3 million loyalty members in São Paulo, considering the population of this country and 15 million. There's significant hidden value clearly there. Could you describe a little bit more how you acquire loyalty members and also whether you have a target number both in São Paulo and then for the overall country, that program specifically?
Thanks. I mean, we have, in internal, we call this the Universo Azul, right? We can capture members via the network, right? John talked about somebody flying Congonhas to Brasília, and then for their holidays, they go to Lisbon or they go to Orlando, right? That happens a lot. It happens very, very frequently. We just didn't have the domestic network in São Paulo to attract that customer, for that to be the entryway into sort of the all the Azul products. The credit card, right? The credit card numbers I showed you They've grown significantly, and they've grown very well at the high end of the range, which meets perfectly well with the demographics in SP1, in Downtown São Paulo. We also have a club, right? Which has actually grown really, really well.
It's grown through the pandemic, which is a monthly recurring revenue product, where customers pay, you know, from 50 BRL to 300 BRL, 400 BRL, 500 BRL to get benefits, to get miles, to get points, early access to discounts. Those are the main ways to do it, is use our network or to use our products. Once these customers fly us, once they have access to our network, that's gonna be the gateway for them to enter into our Universo.
You know, I also wanna highlight, you know, we've seen various statistics that loyalty members, more than 50% of loyalty members are Rio São Paulo-based, right? We wanted to show that less than 10% of ours are São Paulo-based. That shows the opportunity that we have to grow overall. I mean, people in São Paulo understand miles. They understand it. They... It's, it's part of their ecosystem, right? Now they're gonna have a better product to fly, more options, more cities they can serve. That... The fact that it's less than 10% from us, huge opportunity going forward. Our TudoAzul team has, you know, is forecasting next year to be a blowout year for them as we bring more people into our ecosystem.
Great. Thank you.
Anybody else? No. We have a bunch of questions online, but I think that we answered all of them. I don't know if wanna take a look, Alex, but I think we answered all of them.
Yeah. If anybody else here in the room has another question, feel free to check here. One question here, for example, is what's the appropriate level of liquidity for Azul? I think part of it depends on the cost of capital, right? You know, we can comfortably operate with levels of liquidity much lower than what we have today, right? I mean, you know, BRL 2 billion-3 billion is more than what we had in 2019, right? Something in that neighborhood, kind of we all sleep soundly at night. You know, obviously more liquidity is always better, but if you have too much liquidity at a moment when capital is high, you know, that can be a waste. We're gonna be monitoring the capital markets constantly.
You know, ending 2022 with as much cash as we had in 2019 or even more, is highly comfortable. Let's see what else here. Yeah. I think we covered it all here. Good.
John, do you wanna give us a final remark?
No. I just wanna thank everybody for coming here to the Congonhas Airport. I do wanna encourage you all to get our credit card, even those of you that work for different banks, because, you know, flying Azul is gonna be pretty amazing going forward. You know, you have a fully committed team here. You know, I talk a lot about people. You know, these are founders of this airline. Abi is our President. He started this airline with me, so did Alex. You know, we have a whole team of people that get up every day and are passionate about what we've built. We're excited to show you the before and after, 'cause it wasn't just managing a pandemic, it's managing a better airline, right?
Rebuilding it to be a more efficient airline, better customer service, more on time, more profitable going forward. This airline is highly leveraged, folks, on fuel and currency. We understand that. We don't control fuel and currency. What we can do is have the most fuel-efficient fleet in the world with the best people managing it, and we're gonna continue to grow our business going forward. We're gonna continue to delever. We're one of the fastest deleveraging stories that you'll find out there because of the EBITDA production that we have. Feel free to, those of you that are here, reach out to Alex, Abhi, myself, Thais. We have a broader management team here at Azul as well. If anybody has specific questions about our cargo business, our head of cargo is here. TudoAzul is here, right?
We have our Director of Operations is here. We have a lot of our management team is here as well. Those of you that are online, you know how to get ahold of us. I wanna thank everybody for their time today and look forward to, you know, delivering our results in 2023 and sharing those with you. Thank you, everybody.