All right, folks, moving right along. Pleased to be passing the podium over to Spirit Airlines and actually the industry's only Chief Executive Officer that maybe at some point in the future I'll have an opportunity to jam with.
Yes.
I don't know if that will actually happen. From one musician to another, you know, at some point in our lives, we'll have free time. Also, joined by DeAnne Gabel, who you all know, in investor relations, and Eric Monahan, who does pricing and RM for Spirit. Let me turn it over to Ted. Ted, thanks for making the trip.
Okay. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Jamie, for the invite. Hey, if I could make a suggestion, why don't we do this in Florida?
Yeah.
'Cause it's like, it's cold, and I'm not used to this. Like, my bones ache being up here, so.
If you want, I can take Southwest.
Oh, nice. Nice. Okay. I've got a few slides that I can take you guys through, and then we can handle questions. I don't know if there will be any. We don't have anything going on really right now, so I'll do my best to handle those questions. Just one slide on the topic du jour. Obviously, we're in midst of a merger with JetBlue. The Department of Justice filed their complaint on the seventh, which now kicks off the formal process that we all expected. We were anticipating a late 2023 re-resolution to this issue. That's still very much on target at this point.
We're sort of in the early phases of that, you know, participating in that process, doing our best to make sure we get this case through the court. We do have high confidence combined that we have a very supportable argument here and the combination of the seventh and sixth largest airlines in the United States to become the fifth largest airline feels us to be a very pro-competitive move. Feel like at, you know, when you dismiss all the rhetoric, what we're really talking about is providing competition in what is a very top-heavy and dominated space.
Before I kinda touch on our business model and some of the things we're working on these days, just to recap, earlier this morning, we put out an update to our guidance for the first quarter. Just to kinda give you a visual overview of that. The biggest mover in that was fuel. At the time that we did our earnings call, I think our expectation for fuel in the first quarter was around $3.20 a gal. It's now about $3.45-$3.50 a gal. A pretty notable move in fuel. It's been very volatile, as you probably heard from every transportation business explain, most notably in the airline business, the thing that's created the volatility has been the crack spread. Very difficult for us to forecast, but nonetheless, that's the biggest move.
Our unit revenue production is very much on track. Demand has been strong, heading into the peak part of the spring break leisure period and being a Florida-based carrier where a lot of our capacity is, it's gonna be a very, very good spring break for us, so we're excited about that. Good revenue production. We did have a little bit of a modest uptick in the one-time related true up of our pilot vacation and sick liability for the first quarter as a result of our new deal, which was small, but we updated for that as well. We had a little bit less capacity than we talked about back in February. As I went in detail on the earnings call, we are experiencing some issues with the Geared Turbofan that powers the Neo fleet.
At Spirit, we are one of the largest operators of that aircraft variant in the world, actually. When it works, it's a fantastic power plant. Does everything we expect that airplane to do, and we're very excited about it being the core part of our fleet going forward. However, we are experiencing some issues right now. We have six airplanes on the ground right now, and that's a little bit higher than it was when we were back in February. We had to take a little bit of flying out of March, which is not what we wanna do right now, considering how strong March will be. The good news that comes out of that is we kept the unit revenue and the revenue expectations about right on top.
That tells you that things are clicking along nicely there. By the way, I'll get through the slides so we can get to questions. I know, Jamie, you may have a couple about, you know, I guess this JetBlue thing will probably come up. First about Spirit. I'm just about to celebrate my 11th anniversary with this company. It's been the best career decision I've ever made. This is a fantastic place to work, and that's really a testament to the wonderful people that I have an opportunity to work with, and the markets that we serve.
I was flying on the airplane last night and up and down the aisle and routinely stopped by people who have, over time, grown accustomed with the way our model works, become familiar with the way that our product works, and has delivered real value to them and their families. I know that that may not necessarily be the right product for everybody in this room or everybody in the United States, but we do serve a very discretionary segment of the population, and they are very pleased with the product we offer. We've made a lot of strides over the last few years to really improve that product offering. The way we kinda summarize that is value is what's important to people when they're buying any product.
Value isn't how much you spend, it's the exchange between what you get in return. You know, you can spend $50 on a watch and get tremendous value out of that watch because it keeps time and does everything that it's supposed to do. Or you can spend $15,000 on a watch and feel very good about that value as well. It has nothing to do with the amount you spend, it's what you get in return, and that little equation that we provide there, which is value equals experience over price. If you can drive the experience up and drive the price down, the value proposition goes up. That's really what Spirit has been doing over the last decade or more, is providing better experience to our guests at a lower fare.
Again, I'm very proud of the advances we've made and the changes that we've introduced in the industry. These are our key strengths, which we summarized before. I'm just gonna skip past that. What's going on in the marketplace today is that as we've exited the pandemic, leisure demand has been leading the way, and I think it's been continuing to lead the way even as we've kind of reached a more normalized society. We're really well-positioned to serve that marketplace. Leisure demand is kind of divided into a couple of baskets. The biggest would be traditional leisure, people going to on vacation, and we serve a lot of the major leisure destinations in the lower 48, in Latin America, and places that you would wanna be right now, like South Florida.
Shouldn't be in New York 'cause it's cold. You know, Vegas and Orlando and then beach destinations in Latin America like the DR and Cancun. All of those places Spirit serves from a number of destinations or a number of origination markets in the United States. That's kind of regular core leisure. In addition to that is the visiting friends and relatives component of leisure demand. Again, we've built our network to serve that in ways that some of our competitors have not.
Not only do we serve a lot of the places in the lower 48 where people need to go see their family and friends, like in New York and Chicago and the Texas markets and that sort of thing, but we also offer a unique product in and out of Latin America and places that some of our competitors do not serve. In Central America, like Honduras and the Caribbean area like Haiti. Those are big markets for us as well. We kind of piece together all of these different parts of the leisure aspect to provide good service and low fares to our customer base, and that customer base is rebounding in leaps and bounds right now. It's really a very strong demand environment.
Here's a current snapshot of our of our route map with almost 200 airplanes now in service. When I joined 11 years ago, we had about 35, this is quite a growth story over that 10-year period. We now serve all 25 of the largest metro areas in the United States after adding San Antonio just recently. We have all of those as well as a number of small and midsize cities going to the big leisure markets. You can see our Latin American marketplace continuing to expand. A lot of good opportunity in the places where we fly. We've spent a lot of time carving out our opportunity in big metropolitan areas that are largely constrained because of airport constraint, be it slot constraint or facility constraint.
Now we can proudly say that in a number of markets, we are the number two or number three airline. Now, that may be a distant number two. I just noticed that American spoke we're the number two airline at DFW Airport, but, you know, it's kinda like this. We've, we've done what we've done over that period of time to get ourselves in that position to take advantage of the opportunity in these growing metropolitan areas. During the pandemic, we've added a lot of flying and a lot of new markets, in both domestically and internationally. I mentioned San Antonio being the last kind of of the top 25 we added in there. You can see where we've. The yellow dots are all places that we've added during the pandemic.
The black dots were focuses of ours, during that period of time, where we believed we could take advantage of the slowdown and start to carve out a little bit more space. That has worked very well for us here in New York. We, we serve both LaGuardia Airport and Newark Airport. In LaGuardia, we recently took over as a primary tenant at the Marine Air Terminal. For those of you flying in and out of LaGuardia, I know you're very excited about the shiny new terminal at Terminal B, there's nothing more convenient than flying Spirit in and out of the Marine Air Terminal. We're now the primary tenant there, which gives us tremendous flexibility to operate our existing awarded 11 slot pairs, but also to fly outside the slot window.
In fact, today I think we're operating as many as 16 departures a day in and out of LaGuardia. To the extent that additional slots become available, we now have the physical real estate to be able to take advantage of that. That's pretty exciting news for us there. In Newark, we were a successful recipient after an unfortunate necessary lawsuit with the DOT to get additional timings in and out of Newark, and now we're continuing to grow our presence there as well. Combined, over the next, you know, couple of years, we're gonna be 50+ departures in New York, which is a big move for us considering where we were as recently as five years ago. I'm also proud to say that we're getting recognized for the work we're doing.
This year we were just notified that we are the recipient of the ATW Value Airline of the Year award. This is the second time in the last four years that we've been the recipient of that award. This is a worldwide award, a very prestigious value airline award and one that I'm very proud of what the Spirit team has done to get us in this position.
Again, there's a lot of noise out there and rhetoric about the Spirit model and what we do every day, but the people who work for Spirit are very proud of the product we provide, and I know the people that we serve are very thankful for it. Again, another focus of the industries and of ours has been operational reliability, I think we've made significant strides at improving overall reliability. One thing I would say that's consistent with our merger agreement with JetBlue is that scale matters in this regard. Getting larger does naturally enhance your ability to recover your guests, which we've been doing organically. By putting those two airlines together, I think we do the combined customer base a service here.
One thing that we're largely carved out of are what we call favorable agreements between other airlines to move passengers when there is interruption. They're regularly in the industry referred to as Flight Interruption Manifest agreements, where you move passengers between those. Spirit and all the other low-cost carriers are exempted from those by the big airlines. They tend to ignore us and push us out of the way, an argument we've made in a number of venues. By merging together with JetBlue, we can actually create a much larger business that has more opportunities for people to be reaccommodated and more resiliency for our crews.
The work we've done over the years to enhance the value proposition, this may come as a surprise to some of you, but Spirit has a few onboard products that are, may cater to the group in this room, actually. We have what we call the Big Front Seat at the front of the airplane, two rows of two-by-two business class seating that's unique for most ULCCs in the space. One of the best values in the sky as far as we're concerned, and I think our guests who purchase that product agree with us. In addition, we're the only ULCC, I believe, in the world that has high-speed Wi-Fi on board all of its aircraft, powered by Thales. And it is the fastest Wi-Fi available on any airline today. Good products innovations at the airport.
We're one of the early adopters in advancing touchless technology and self-bag drop technology that allows people to use biometrics to move through the process a lot faster. We've now rolled that out to half a dozen or more airports in the United States and looking forward to continue to doing that going forward. I mentioned some of the product offerings that we offer to our guests. What's great about these à la carte models is you get to pick the things that are important to you and pay only for those things, so you're not subsidizing bad behavior by your neighbors who are bringing too many bags on board and all that. That's not what you're doing. You're just paying for the things that you use.
What we love about our product innovations is we're enhancing not just the chance to buy new products, but increasing the comfort and the speed at which you can do that. Here's a snapshot of the fleet. We operate all variants of the A320 family today, the A319, A320, and A321. What will happen over the next few years is that we're going to go through one of the more generational shifts here. The A319ceo airplane will be completely retired over the next two- years from our fleet. That's about 30 aircraft. Our delivery stream over this two-year period will largely consist of the A321neo, which will have 235 seats on it, even more than our A321ceo.
We're gonna have a tremendous opportunity to increase unit cost efficiency across the fleet and unit fuel efficiency across the fleet. In fact, fuel efficiency between the A319ceo and the A321neo is nearly 40% on a unit basis. We're gonna have a big boom to fuel costs as well as the environment. Here's again, what drives low costs is there's no mystery here 'cause we've been talking about this for a long time. If you look on the right-hand side of this chart, you can see average fleet age. We still operate one of the youngest fleets in the world at seven years. What will happen during the next couple of years, we'll drop that by almost two years.
A pretty notable change in our in our fleet mix that's gonna happen to us in the in the near term. One of the strengths of our model is the à la carte portion of that, and we've had a lot of good success at driving that number north. Prior to the pandemic, our peak non-ticket production per passenger segment was about $55. That was where we were hanging out, and we were constantly being asked, "Have you guys reached the ceiling? What's the opportunity set? Where could it go from here?" Now we just reported the fourth quarter at about $70, and we're looking at continuing opportunity to drive that number north.
The reason that this is so effective is it is our belief that it is largely accretive to the total price paid by the consumer. The reason for that is because we believe, and again, Eric Monahan's here, he runs pricing revenue management, he's in charge of all this. We believe we were mispricing those products earlier on in our history, and so when they are appropriately priced, the total clearing price for our travel is just higher, which is a really good unit revenue tailwind for us. Unit costs are what help us deliver all of those fares profitably. It is the number one focus of this business beyond safety, and one that we spend a lot of time on. We've obviously seen considerable inflation across the business.
I know all airlines and transportation businesses have. And so our unit cost has increased. But what's important to us is to maintain our advantage against our competitors so that we are, we have enough headroom to deliver our product with lower fares and stimulate the activity that we want. What we're seeing is that advantage in absolute is continuing to widen. The pressures that all of us are seeing, wage-related pressures, airport-related pressures, maintenance-related pressures, all airlines are seeing those. They are eating away at the big guys faster than us. Our objective is to continue to widen that advantage, obviously drive costs down where we can to enhance the margin opportunity.
I mentioned earlier, fuel per ASM, we're already one of the most fuel-efficient airlines in the world, when it comes to a seat base, and that's going to go north of 100 ASMs per gal, as we kind of go through this fleet renewal. A lot of opportunity here on both cost and the impact we're having on climate. Primary objective number one since the pandemic began to simmer down has been us building our capacity back to a more normalized rate. We've talked at length about that at every opportunity, the progress we're making today continues. We are on track to get to full utilization by the end of this year, despite the challenges we've seen on the fleet side with engine removals and aircraft delivery delays.
All of that groundwork that we laid over the last two- years to improve operational reliability is working, and we're on our way towards a more normalized utilization. That's important to a low-cost business because we'll be more efficient, which drives the margin opportunity and gets us back to where we wanna be in the go-forward business. I intentionally moved along quickly to reserve time for questions. Thank you all very much for your attention, and I'll turn it over to the field.
Sorry. Please encourage participation. Relative to February of 2022 and recognizing that the demand environment, you know, I mean, that was still a Covid quarter, for lack of a better term. Setting that aside, would you say that managing Spirit today is more challenging, less challenging, or the same for you and your team?
Compared to February of 2022?
Correct.
Uh-
Specifically, early February 2022.
Well, I think the positives there, the things that have gotten, obviously, that was around. I assume you picked that on purpose. That was around the time when the demand environment really started to kinda swing, and of course, we announced a merger with Frontier. Two big things happened to us during that period of time. From managing the day to day, it's always great to see demand returning the way you want it to. The team has been responding to that well. The network's been responding well. The work that we put in place post the summer of 2021 to make operational reliability really started to gain hold during that window of time and as we headed into the summer of last year, positive returns from that.
Those would be the things that the day-to-day Spirit management employee is dealing with. I would say that those are all tailwinds. Yes. In February of last year, we announced a merger with Frontier, and then subsequent to that, received a competitive offer from JetBlue that kind of played its way out into the summer. That has clearly created distraction, and at times frustration for some. I would say that the people that are dealing with that are very small in count. I'm one of them. We've done a great job staying together as a group. One of the things that I probably was most concerned with was, will that distraction create a flight of quality? Will we have a brain drain?
I can say proudly today, a year removed, that has not been the case. The opposite has been true. We've been successfully attracting candidates to the management team based on the opportunity. It's never easy to run an airline, but the group has done a fantastic job at navigating what has been a very unusual set of circumstances.
Above and beyond that, I mean, it feels as if the OEM challenges are worse today. The pilot hiring challenges and certainly pilot economics are different.
Mm-hmm.
Today. In terms of sort of those broad competitive issues, better, worse, or the same?
I'd say the fleet-related dynamic is probably worse than it was then, but manageable. You know, these are things that airlines deal with from time to time. You know, I made my comments on the earnings call about our concerns with Pratt, and they've always been a very good partner of ours, and they're responding well to making sure that we're gonna continue to make progress this year. Airbus delivery delays happen from time to time, and it's troubling because it creates, you know, it makes it difficult to forecast your network. Those feel like regular airline problems to solve. As far as staffing challenges go, you know, that has been new. I wouldn't say it's worse since then. I would say it's better.
We've obviously signed a new contract with our pilots that's having the desired effect. We're still attracting plenty of flight attendants, and being able to execute to our business strategy. I think that's begun to stabilize and go in the right direction.
Specific to the pilots, because you did identify that in this morning's guide, some of the initial costs coming in higher than expected.
Right.
Was that just a forecast error? Is there a variable component?
It unfortunately.
Unaware of? I just, I mean, not to beat you up on it. I just don't.
No, it's okay.
I didn't understand how that would be a metric you would miss on.
Yeah. It, I don't feel beat up. It was a forecast error. At the time, again, what we were talking about is all of our liabilities on the books with regard to leave. Vacation and sick had to be repriced at the new rates. We did our best job to estimate that as of the time of our earnings call. Once we then pumped it through the full model and looked person by person, we had a modest change. Yeah.
In fairness, I don't have a full model to drop contracts into either. I mean, all we look at, you know.
I'm glad to hear that, Jamie. You know.
Well, I'm just a guy in an office here. You have teams to figure this out. One of the themes that came up today, and I expect to continue coming up today are just changes in how the U.S. traveler is flying. We've heard from other airlines that are experiencing fairly significant change. In fairness, they used to carry a lot of business travelers. They may cater to a different demographic. You must track your customers very, very carefully. What are they doing differently versus pre-pandemic?
Well, I can go first, if you guys, yeah, wanna jump in. I would say that the first obvious comment that we're seeing in consumer behavior is the discretionary choice with their spend. That isn't necessarily like a light switch that happened as a result of the pandemic, but it's been accelerated, I think, as a result of the pandemic. There is more demand than we anticipated. I think that that is not because we're having more babies. I think it's because people are choosing to buy things differently than they did before. Which is a boon to a leisure-based airline like ourselves, because that's largely what it is.
Secondarily to that, which is sort of an adjunct to it, is that, as a result of the pandemic, the work environment has changed. No doubt you guys have seen that in all of your places. We've clearly experienced it as well, at Spirit. The weekends have gotten longer as a result. I would say booking activity throughout the week is a little bit different, too. Thursdays are bigger than they used to be. Mondays are bigger than they used to be, that kind of thing, you know, which is helping spread the week some. This is Eric Monahan in our PRM department. Do you add anything more to that?
Yeah. Just kind of talking about travel patterns and maybe seasonality. I would say for us, again, at Spirit specifically, maybe less impactful. First quarter played out pretty much in line with our expectations from a seasonality perspective, so nothing surprising there. You know, I'd say, obviously, the pandemic really kind of blew traditional seasonality up. You know, I would say we're kind of moving back in line with, you know, more traditional view of seasonality. Not exactly sure where that's gonna settle. I think there's certainly gonna be some differences. You know, Ted mentioned, you know, you may have some traffic now shifting into a Thursday where traditionally it was a Friday.
in terms of peak off-peak, I would say that, you know, we're kinda moving back in line with what we would view as more traditional seasonality.
I don't wanna lead the witness, knowing what you know now about some of these shifts, first quarter of next year, if you had the exact identical demand set, would you have higher yields? Economy constant, demand constant, just your knowledge of passenger demand being better, having lived through this first quarter, would you have higher yields next first quarter?
Yeah, I would say from my perspective, I didn't find this quarter surprising.
Okay.
Ted, let me jump in. Obviously, you have to run the airline independently. Can't think about what the future may hold in terms of the day-to-day. When you think about maybe what you can do to add in some flexibility for the preferred case of the deal going through. When you think about airplanes coming this year or the discussion with Airbus about how you configure the aircraft, when you think about how you may pay for the aircraft this year, maybe rather than locking in long-term financing, maybe more short-term debt, something that doesn't necessarily jeopardize standalone Spirit, but may lay the groundwork for a more accretive transaction with JetBlue down the road. Any examples of that, where you might have done things or are doing things differently, knowing that a merger could be coming?
No. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, that's probably not just because Justice might be listening. That's a truism. We are behaving as a standalone business today. We're doing everything that we would do otherwise. I mentioned this when we signed our merger agreement with JetBlue, that one of the things that was very important to Spirit was to maintain that autonomy and be able to operate that way. We believe that what we're doing, by the way, is in the best interest of any enterprise going forward. The decisions we're making, I don't think are marginal that way. Be it the way we finance the airplanes, be it our configuration, all that stuff, we still feel like those are the right decisions to make.
It wasn't meant to be a trick question.
Okay.
A trap question.
'Cause I didn't fall into it.
You did a good job. Anyone else in the room? Questions from the room?
Thanks. Let's see. How concerned are you about D.C. changing how they allow people to charge for ancillary fees? How concerned are you about your business model potentially being forced to change?
I'm very bullish about the case that we have to present to the extent that it is necessary to defend the case that our model is very pro-consumer. It's very transparent. The decisions that our consumers make are educated ones, and assuming otherwise is, quite frankly, ignorant. I do find, you know it interesting. Obviously, we all had a chance, potentially, to read the complaint that Justice levied against the JetBlue-Spirit merger. In there, they advocate a lot of the things that Spirit does today. And talking about the à la carte model being very positive. Clearly, Justice agrees with me in that regard, that I think we do have a very defensible and pro-consumer model.
To the extent that there are issues that arise with regard to the ancillary model that the department wants to talk about, we're always active listeners, and we're participants with our partners at the department to make sure we're doing the right thing. I think one thing that I've been proud of with Spirit is that we've been lauded for our transparency in the way that we package and sell our products, not just by ourselves, but by consumer advocacy groups telling us that we're doing the right thing there. Our model just shouldn't come as a surprise and doesn't come as a surprise. You pay for what you get. And I think that case would carry a lot of water to the extent it were necessary to defend it.
Ted, let's fast-forward two years. We'll probably be back in the main room by then, but not across the street yet.
In Florida.
Or in Florida. That's right. Two years from now, the DOJ has been satisfied in one way, shape, form or another, and it's time for JetBlue and Spirit to begin the integration, and DOT is still standing in the way from a certification perspective. What can and can't you do at that point relative to bringing the two brands into one?
Well, I wish I had all the answers to that, and I don't. We're sort of in unprecedented land here, where historically, the Transportation Department has viewed mergers a certain way in their review of those. To the extent that the setup is what you're describing there, that would be different than the way it's been, I guess, you know, reviewed in the past. So I would have to defer to some of our regulatory lawyers to kind of best answer that question. It sort of depends on the nature of their objection as to how we would tackle it. I would tell you that that would be an unprecedented move, and I know I've heard our merger partners discuss the fact that they would intend to challenge that. I think we would have a good case there too as well.
From an operational perspective, I mean, there are myriad cases of that. I mean, American has multiple operating certificates.
Oh, sure.
I still go to one website. I still transact with one airline. They look similar on, you know, Envoy is on one certificate.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, you've got examples in Europe, you know, holding companies. I mean, just sort of execution-wise, what hinges on common certification?
So if the-
A single operating certificate.
I think I understand. If the only hang-up here were our ability to migrate to a single operating certificate, yes, you could operate as two independent operating certificates, with similar marketing platforms. The benefits that inure to the organization as a result of migrating certificates are on the back end. They have to do with how labor flows and how aircraft flow. You would sacrifice some of that if you were operating independently. The top-end benefits, the benefits of being able to market the product correctly and do all of that, obviously you could do that. If that were the hang-up, was the single, yeah.
Ted, let me just ask another question, fleet related. Just on Airbus, on the Airbus side, do you think you're gonna get all the planes that you have contracted this year? How's the supply chain looking? How's the cadence of deliveries relative to where you thought they'd be now that we're into March for this year?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. We're not gonna get all the airplanes that we had originally been contracted to receive. That news was already delivered to us the very tail end of last year to the beginning of this year. We've had to update our capacity guidance as a result of that earlier this year and our view on deliveries. I think that about 10 airplanes, in our case, we would have taken in the mid-30s, and we're now gonna take in the mid-20s in new deliveries this year. Airbus is experiencing some, much like all other businesses, some supply constraint, and supply chain issues that are limiting their ability to deliver this year.
Those will just push into the next year and they've given us at least a verbal review that they intend to catch that up as quickly as possible as we head into 2024.
No recent update from, say, two, three months ago?
No. No. Where we sat, kind of as of the time of our call is still consistent today. They've been hitting those numbers, I guess is what I would say.
Just a question on, you know, when we think about loyalty, brand, et c., your program obviously is at a different scale than some of your peers. You know, since you announced the deal with JetBlue, are customers more or less likely to, you know, open an account with Spirit? Are you seeing any change in consumer behavior whatsoever in that regard?
I can't, you know, connect it to an announcement with a, with a merger partner, we have seen, we believe it's organically, largely as a result of the redesigned loyalty program that we launched in 2021 and our, the redesign of our points system and our credit card relationship with Bank of America. That is driving more attachment. I think that's has more to do with our improvement in our product than it does necessarily, I think.
Okay. What's your paid load factor, for the Big Front Seats?
Well, we haven't discussed that publicly, but I think we're always moving that towards, 100%, you know, trying to get there as close as we can.
Well, the reason I ask is that you know, the premium market appears to be the fastest growing market. It's hard for me to prove that, but just based on the, you know, the narrative we have from other airlines, and that product seems like your best opportunity to sort of put more than just one toe, maybe one foot into that market. I'm just wondering if you're missing out on something or would consider expanding that. I'm not suggesting you're gonna go full upscale premium demand is strong.
Yeah.
You have very little product allocated to that demographic or to that market.
Well, I alluded to it earlier in the broader base of non-ticket revenue and how we've seen significant tailwind there, and that has to do with how Eric and his department have been pricing those products. I think that is 100% true with the way that the Big Front Seat has responded lately. Setting aside the load factor in it, the paid yield on the Big Front Seat has been dramatically improving, and I think that, again, speaks to two things. One is were we appropriately priced before in that product, and two is the demand is clearly better.
Does it sell out first, or is it usually taken at the airport, you know, as people are so, you know, I have long, I have legs?
Well, I'll keep you out of the. This is a dynamically priced product, so we much like. Remember, the Big Front Seat is a seat assignment. It is not a class of service on Spirit. You're buying a ticket on Spirit and then separately deciding whether or not you want the Big Front Seat. We dynamically price that based on the demand we're reading in the market, based on what our forecast for that demand is, based on the take rates, based on the load factor in that, and they adjust accordingly. Much like you always reserve inventory, you're doing the same there. Yep. Microphone coming your way. Yeah.
Thanks. Just wanted to ask a couple questions about, sort of pilot attrition, the pilot shortage, relationship with ATP, the new contract, how that's alleviating any sort of, pilots switching carriers. If you could just sort of address this and maybe what's being done to alleviate the pilot shortage?
Sure. we started to experience elevated attrition, you know, a year or more ago, as a result of all airlines hiring back to a, you know, a more full-scale operation with clearly the larger volume providers in the U.S. having retired quite a few of their pilots that created a big vacancy. To adjust to that, we did a couple of things. The first is that we increased the size of our schoolhouse to be able to handle more pilots coming through us, which we've been successfully filling since that period of time. We've also signed a new contract, I mentioned, with our pilots earlier, which increased pay rates and benefits for them and so we've seen that have its desired effect on both attrition and throughput from the bottom end.
In addition to that, to your point about how are we creating enough pilot supply to address the shortage, Spirit has been, while we haven't announced any kind of formal schools that you may have heard from some of the bigger airlines, we have engaged in a number of partnerships with smaller academies and schools that are providing certificated air, you know, airmen and airwomen out of that. I think we're now up to around 10 or a dozen of those relationships, which once they reach maturity, are going to be producing enough pilots to probably fill the vast majority of our need at this point. The good news is the market is beginning to work, right?
Demand is there for pilots, and the supply is starting to be addressed with more people wanting to become pilots. There is a problem moving this through the snake right now. There's a lot of vacancy, and we've worked with our partners at our lobbying organization, I know the A4A has, to try to look for relief because this is a challenge for the industry right now, because it does require a good deal of time to become a Part 121 certificated pilot in the industry today. We continue to work that angle where we can, and we're doing these other things to address Spirit's needs.
Ted, thank you very much.
Thanks, guys.