Hello, bonjour, welcome on board on our journey to reaching new frontiers. Thank you for joining us this morning, whether you're in person or online. The event today is available in both official languages. [Foreign language] . For those of you who may require it, we have earpieces outside the room should you need a direct translation. [Foreign language] , if you are online, you have the option to select the language of your choice at the bottom right of your screen. [Foreign language] .
You can select the language of your choice on the bottom corner of your screen. This event will be in English, but you can ask your questions in the language of your choice.
Number one priority at Air Canada. And so for those of you who know me, you know I was a flight attendant back in the day, and I haven't lost my touch, so I will point you to the emergency exits available at the back of the room or at the outside of the room to the left. Yeah, the left, yes. The other left, yeah. So, and for those of you who have traveled here with us using the meetings and conventions code, we are offsetting your flight today. So today you will hear from our speakers. We will have a break halfway through, a 15-minute break halfway through. And as we embark on our journey this morning, I invite you to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
I will not ask you to fasten your seatbelts, but I will direct your attention to the screen, to our forward-looking statement. And I will also direct your attention to the screen for our non-GAAP measures to provide you with additional information on our operational and financial performance. So with that, it is my absolute pleasure to welcome our President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Michael Rousseau. Thank you.
Good morning and welcome to Air Canada's 2024 Investor Day. First, I'd like to thank you, the financial analysts and members of the broader investment community who follow and believe in our company. I appreciate the time you take to understand our airline, our strategy, and keep up with all our initiatives. The objective today is to detail a compelling investment thesis and how this translates into higher value ahead. You will leave here today with many more reasons to be excited, positive, and confident about the future of our airline, like our leadership team is. To begin, I would like to start with the first and perhaps the most fundamental reasons for investors to be confident in the future. This is our proven track record of executing on our commercial and financial strategies and delivering on our commitments.
When I joined Air Canada, the company was on life support. We were in a very challenging economic environment in 2009, with a difficult financial situation and a CAD 2.8 billion pension solvency deficit. At a certain point, our shares were trading for a little more than a CAD 1. We had clear opportunities, but our fleet was seriously in need of renewal. We were also underutilizing our hubs. Our immediate goal was to stabilize the company, beginning with the balance sheet. Once this was done, we set about transforming our company.
At our first investor day in 2013, we were at the early stages of our transformation. We had a clear plan to methodically address each of the issues that were holding the company back. And history shows we delivered on those priorities and much more. Our operating revenue went from CAD 9.7 billion in 2009 to CAD 19.1 billion in 2019.
That is a 7% CAGR growth. Our net loss per share of CAD 0.18 turned into a diluted EPS of CAD 3.37 in 2019. The pension deficit was fully reversed. As of January 1, 2024, our pension solvency surplus is now more than CAD 4 billion. Our share price, which closed at CAD 1.23 at the end of 2009, surpassed CAD 50 in 2019, making it the best-performing stock on the TSX for the past decade. We are very confident we have the strategic plan and the leadership team to deliver all the future objectives we are outlining today. We have a strong, proven commercial strategy and a competitive advantage in the markets in which we operate, supported by a focused and improving operational customer service metrics and a strong balance sheet and risk management practices.
An important part of our past transformation strategy was to compete more effectively with new and growing domestic, transborder, and international carriers. To do this, we invested in fleet, established strong partnerships focused on our hubs, and refined our product offerings to establish Air Canada as one of the world's leading full-service airlines. We grew our widebody fleet with 777s and 787s and placed an order for the Quebec-made C Series, now the very popular Airbus A220. We launched Air Canada Rouge in 2012 to give us a better tool to compete in the low-cost and leisure markets. At the same time, we expanded the Air Canada Vacations portfolio, giving customers more options to choose from. We developed relationships with strong partners.
Two good examples are the transatlantic joint venture with Lufthansa and United, which supports our Atlantic flying, and our transborder joint business agreement with United, which we expanded in 2022. Today, we have built up three hubs. Toronto is our primary global hub. Vancouver is our gateway to the Pacific, and Montreal is our transatlantic hub. We are the foreign carrier that flies more than any other into the United States, which remains the world's largest commercial aviation market. We leverage our hubs as convenient transfer points for Sixth Freedom connecting international travel, and Mark Galardo will detail our network and fleet strategy. The investments made over time in product have given us a premium market leadership position. This is evidenced by numerous awards we win and being ranked by Skytrax as a top 30 airline and a four-star rated network carrier.
We have also advanced our onboard offering, including an expanded and award-winning in-flight entertainment portfolio, including fast, reliable, and soon to be free for Aeroplan members Wi-Fi. On the ground, we've opened up new Maple Leaf Lounges, including our Air Canada Signature Suite and Air Canada Cafés. And over time, we've made continuous advancements in technology, staying at the forefront of the industry. Earlier this month, we launched biometric boarding in Vancouver. This not only appeals to customers but increases efficiency. We have further honed our revenue management, sales, and distribution infrastructure. We have long been a leader in branded fares and innovative pricing, and we are determined to maintain this advantage. We have also begun a journey to update our operational systems, which will enhance the customer experience. We've also deepened our relationships with the travel agency community, which are important partners to us and essential for many of our customers.
In 2023, we launched the New Distribution Capability, which further modernized our product distribution, offering new benefits and provided more content and comprehensive partner support. Mark Nasr will provide more insights on these and future developments in our products and technology area, and he'll also speak to you with great passion about the ongoing airplane transformation. In 2019, we repurchased Aeroplan and brought it back in-house. It is proving itself to be an effective loyalty tool and a revenue generator that creates value in many ways now and as we go forward. We have been building a portfolio of partnerships with brands people use every day, such as Starbucks or Parkland gas stations. In a circular effect, Aeroplan keeps us connected with members when they are not flying and incentivizes them to choose Air Canada when they do fly.
We are committed to further enriching the program and reinforcing loyalty through appealing new offers. Aeroplan gives us a true competitive advantage, and it brings incremental revenue opportunities. We are positioning Air Canada to be a leader that will meet, if not surpass, the expectations of broader stakeholders. Mitigating emissions, supporting communities, and promoting equality, opportunity, and inclusion are not only the right thing to do, but they also strengthen our social license to operate. In 2012, we formalized some of our community activities by establishing the Air Canada Foundation. Since its inception, the foundation has supported tens of thousands of children in Canada by funding social and school breakfast programs, providing medical transport assistance, and fulfilling wishes. Today, we will be making a donation to one of these charities on your behalf, and we invite you to select a charity at the designated area.
Over time, we have also developed an agile culture and the ability to rapidly seize opportunities. Coming out of the pandemic, we decided, despite our good customer service reputation, to further develop the softer side of our customer experience. Aside from investing in technology to support our goals, we have put in place a continuous improvement program to elevate the customer experience through operational excellence, and we are pleased with the performance and progress made to date. Craig will speak further to this and walk you through how these initiatives will also continue to improve productivity and deliver margin expansion. Our customers are central to what we do, as we will underscore in our presentations today. Earning their trust and loyalty drives our commitment to excellence. Ensuring we meet customer expectations, if not exceed them, is extremely important to us.
By continually investing and enhancing the travel experience, we aim to become the airline of choice for reliability and service in a sometimes complex environment. Through it all, our employees are the driving force that propels us forward. Their dedication and passion are part of what makes Air Canada a leader in the industry. Arielle will have more to say about how our people, who are core to our strategy, continue to elevate the customer experience and improve productivity. We stand on a strong foundation that gives us competitive advantages. These include a resilient balance sheet and liquidity management, which ensure financial stability, flexibility, and responsible risk profile. A streamlined, modern, fuel-efficient fleet with market-leading aircraft configurations that cater to diverse customer segments.
A global network that connects Canada to the world, enhanced by the airline's membership at Star Alliance and by numerous commercial arrangements with leading airlines across the globe. A widely recognized and powerful brand. An enhanced customer experience with competitive products and services, including Aeroplan. Air Canada Rouge and Air Canada Vacations strengthen their position in the leisure markets. A growing cargo offering with freighters dedicated to specific cargo lanes and complementary to our existing cargo network, enabling us to capitalize on the increasing demand from the global marketplace. New core technologies and other technological improvements that streamline operations and enhance the overall customer experience, travel experience for our customers. And our talented people, whose dedication and award-winning culture drive our success and ensure we deliver outstanding service to all our customers. I also want to remind everyone that our company is also a critical driver of the Canadian economy.
We forge essential connections connecting Canada to the world and the world through Canada. Our role is consistently creating wealth, jobs, and opportunities. It's deeply impactful, now more than ever. For instance, studies conducted for the 2023 year showed that we continue to increase our total economic output. In fact, it has grown to nearly CAD 70 billion, and our GDP contribution has also increased to more than CAD 30 billion, and we support more than 260,000 jobs directly and indirectly, and now, customers have returned. Many markets are ahead of where they were in 2019, and we're growing again with new routes to such places as Manila, Naples, and Singapore. Profitability has been restored and will continue to increase given our investments in our plan. We have significantly deleveraged with net debt at the end of September down CAD 1.1 billion from a year ago.
With our recent NCIB, we are returning value to shareholders. Our stock has appreciated in recent months, and we believe it has a lot more room to increase further. The story of Air Canada's performance is about a culture of execution and consistently delivering on its commitments. I want to stress this as we sit here today and present our 28 objectives and 2030 ambition. We are in an excellent position to successfully execute our long-term plans, to rise even higher and reach new frontiers. Today, we announced our plans for future growth. We're targeting to reach CAD 30 billion in revenues in 2028 with an adjusted EBITDA margin of over 17%. We will accelerate revenue growth to 7%-8% CAGR over the period. Again, Mark Galardo will speak to the themes supporting our commercial strategy.
This will soon include evolving and reestablishing the Rouge product in a consistent manner, buttressed with an optimized product. We are planning to increase our adjusted EBITDA margin throughout the period. We plan to achieve this through efficient execution, strategic investments in fleet and technology, leveraging our network reach and scale, operational excellence, and labor productivity. The entire team will expand on the plans behind this. We expect to generate CAD 20 billion in cumulative cash from operations driven by a 90% conversion rate for adjusted EBITDA, keeping our capital investment at 12% of revenues, which will allow us to reach a structural cash flow margin of 5%. And John will expand on this. All of our plans are supported by a disciplined capital allocation approach and commitment to maintaining a strong balance sheet and responsible risk profile to support value creation for our shareholders.
Again, John will also dive deeper into this area as well. Altogether, these elements form a cohesive framework to drive value for the business and its shareholders. Our commitment to excellence will ensure its execution. We are deeply grateful for the unwavering commitment and passion of our people. They propel us forward and transform our ambitions, plans into reality. The dedication and hard work of every individual has been instrumental in building a foundation for sustained success. We have created something truly remarkable with the best yet to come, and it is in the spirit of collaboration and innovation that will steer us into reaching new frontiers. Thank you for taking the time to be here today, in person or virtually. We're very excited to share with you our confidence and enthusiasm in our future plans and initiatives.
For those of you in the room, I also encourage you to please take the opportunity to speak to our senior executives who are in attendance today. I now invite John to walk you through the details of our investment thesis. Thank you.
Okay. Well, good morning to everybody. I'm John Di Bert, CFO, and I've been with Air Canada for just over a year and a half now. I see some familiar faces in the room as well. I spent most of my career, 25 years or so, in aerospace and aviation. So actually, it's just a thrill to be here with everybody and really iconic Air Canada. So I'd like to thank you, first of all, for joining us in Toronto. And for those that are on the live broadcast, thank you for being there as well.
I'm very excited this morning to share with you our value creation roadmap. Air Canada represents a unique and a compelling value creation opportunity. Since emerging from the pandemic, we have restored our balance sheet strength. We have recovered operational performance, and we're now in the final stages of recovering our network capacity. More importantly, we've been hard at work developing a comprehensive value creation strategy that leverages our strengths and our competitive advantages. This strategy will yield returns to our investors. It will enhance our customer experience, and it will elevate our employees for years to come. Our plan integrates our network, fleet, operational, and financial strategies, and as we execute, we will produce world-class financial performance. Our aspirations are clear.
I'm confident that we will exceed CAD 30 billion in revenues by 2030, achieve best-in-class adjusted EBITDA margins of 18%-20%, produce strong, reliable free cash flow targeting 5% free cash flow margins, reward our investors by deploying over CAD 2 billion towards a 20% reduction in share count. We are already in motion on executing the plan. We'll leverage our proven performance culture, our disciplined management style, and superior balance sheet to create value and enhance our risk-reward proposition. Now, I think this is a great chart, and it's one that probably you can hang on to as we go through the day. I hope that you have the same conviction in the underlying strategies and those levers that I do after having worked this plan with the team for the last 12 months. Let me start. Let me dive right into this plan.
First, we believe that Air Canada is entering an important growth phase that allows us to target more than CAD 30 billion in revenue. We think it's fueled by the last stage of capacity recovery, moderate Canadian GDP growth, our U.S. Sixth Freedom market expansion, and increasing travel demand to fast-growing international destinations to serve the needs of new Canadians. This growth will be delivered through significant fleet investments, best-in-class aircraft, leveraging our brands, enhancing the customer travel experience, and strengthening customer trust through the power of our world-class loyalty program. Second, our growth and the strategic fleet investments will drive network scale and efficiency and deliver increased productivity and the benefits of a modern fleet, effectively lowering our unit costs as we grow. Air Canada is targeting over 300 basis points of margin expansion by 2028, and it aspires to 18%-20% adjusted EBITDA margins by 2030.
Third, we believe that Air Canada can deliver consistent, reliable, and structural free cash flow of approximately 5% of revenue, even as it makes disciplined investments in the airline. Our free cash flow generation is anchored in very high-quality conversion of adjusted EBITDA to cash from operations. The ability to convert earnings to cash, combined with strong margins and disciplined CapEx allocation, will underpin consistent free cash flow generation. Fourth, our focus on free cash generation and the strength of our balance sheet will drive shareholder value creation. We have always been and will continue to be strong capital allocators. As we enter a more stable environment and we advance our plan, we will manage our liquidity levels towards 15% of revenues. We will keep a keen eye on leverage, maintaining a sub-2x net leverage ratio. We remain confident in the exceptional access to additional liquidity should that need arise.
Our excess liquidity and free cash flow generation will be made available to investors as we target a 20% reduction in total share count and return fully diluted shares to below CAD 300 million. Now that I've shared our 2030 aspirations, let me pivot to our 2028 objectives. These objectives will serve as our guideposts as we execute the core fleet and network expansion phase of our plan. We are targeting approximately CAD 30 billion in revenue in 2028, an annual growth rate of 7%-8% per year versus 2024. We're driving to adjusted EBITDA margins of 17% or more by 2028 after some margin pressure in 2025. The combination of top-line growth and margin expansion will deliver adjusted EBITDA of CAD 5 billion or more by 2028.
Through the plan period, we are focused on preserving strong earnings to cash conversion and wish to maintain a cash conversion rate of 90% of Adjusted EBITDA. Our plan is designed to invest in the airline through strategic CapEx deployment, generate free cash flow, pay to pay down debt, as well as to make cash available to our shareholders. We are targeting 2028 CapEx at 12% of revenue or less, and our free cash flow margin target is set at 5%. Now, turning to the next slide, Mark Galardo will expand on the underlying drivers of demand growth and show why we are very well positioned to capture our rightful share of these accelerating markets, but I want to give you a preview.
Let me start with straightforward natural growth defined as both system-level recovery back to 2019 levels and reflecting a period of moderate GDP growth from 2019 through 2028. In aggregate, this should support more than 3% increased annual travel demand over the plan period. We're also confident that our U.S. Sixth Freedom franchise should see accelerated growth as we seek to double our market share from 1%-2% of U.S. transoceanic traffic traveling through our Canadian hubs. With over a decade of optimizing our hubs and network schedule to service key niche U.S. markets, we are now doubling our fleet of A220s to support expansion and capture our fair share of this traffic. Another key growth accelerator is the strength of Canadian immigration levels experienced over the last decade.
Our evolving demographics have created a generational structural tailwind for international travel to high-growth destinations such as India, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Through our partnerships and our direct connections to the key major destinations, Air Canada is ideally suited to capture our rightful share of this growing traffic. Our investments in new 787-10 will allow us to support the increased demand for long-haul flying. Traffic-driven growth will be enhanced by our yield contributions that will keep pace with CPI. We will capitalize on the continuing shift to premium cabins by offering more premium capacity. Finally, it's worth noting that we have never been better equipped to support yield growth than we are now, with partnerships, leading brands, revenue-innovating technology, and the country's best loyalty program. Altogether, we see revenue growing at 7%-8% per annum on 5%-6% capacity.
We're confident in our growth opportunities, and we consider certain segments our right to win. Now, this following chart simply illustrates our analyzed growth over specific periods and will put some perspective on the reasonability of our future-looking growth expectations. Though we are driving 5%-6% capacity growth from 2024 to 2028, it is worth noting that if we measure capacity growth starting with 2019 levels, the 10-year period between 2019 and 2028 is projected to produce a 2% CAGR, which is in line with moderate GDP over that period. Taking a historical view, Air Canada has grown 3% over the last 10 years from 2015 to 2024. So altogether, over a 15-year period from 2015 to 2028, our plan suggests a 3%-4% per annum growth rate.
We believe that it is consistent with normal travel demand, plus faster growth due to Canadian population and demographic forces, and our strong positioning in U.S. sixth freedom market share increases. Now, here's some additional data to support our narrative on growth. Mark will add much more color and context, but let me walk you through it. Across the top, you can see that Canada-India travel traffic has increased by over 10% per year over the last seven years. Separately, you can see that 80% of U.S. international travelers would have a viable and compelling option to connect through one of Air Canada's three key hubs for transatlantic or transpacific destinations. This presents an attractive, addressable market. Over the next four years, we are planning to grow network ASMs and premium capacity at the same rate.
We will also continue to leverage the strength of Aeroplan, where premium members often spend significantly more than non-member passengers in both frequency of travel and premium cabin offering. Okay, I think this chart is great because it's simple, and it actually is right to the point. We're driving an adjusted EBITDA plan that aims to deliver 10% annual earnings growth. Let's take a few minutes to walk through the chart. Starting with our 2024 guide at CAD 3.5 billion and adding incremental revenues at approximately 15%, reflecting a conservative base profitability. From here, let's add the benefits of our margin expansion levers: network scale and optimization, modern fleet economics, and labor productivity. Together, these three key levers generate 300 basis points of margin expansion, worth approximately CAD 1 billion of recurring incremental adjusted EBITDA contribution by 2028.
Now, we do face some headwinds, particularly in 2025, where we're going to feel some lagging inflationary pressure, specifically as labor agreements, airport fees, and maintenance costs catch up to the recent inflation cycle. We also expect an evolving regulatory environment. So in summary, we see 2024 margins at around 16% and then stalling a little bit in 2025, and then further driving higher as we execute our margin expansion plan and deliver 17% or better EBITDA margins in 2028. Overall, our EBITDA target is to grow over CAD 1.5 billion from current levels. Okay, let me provide some additional insight on our margin expansion plan and the underlying drivers of better cost. The two top boxes, network scale and optimization, together drive up to 150 basis points of margin expansion from 2024 to 2028.
The scale efficiencies are largely driven by better absorbing fixed costs as they grow at half the rate of our ASM increases. Scale should create between CAD 250 million-CAD 300 million in cost efficiencies. Recall that we are still approximately at 90% of 2019 levels in capacity and are therefore still suffering some under-optimization relative to 2019. Network optimization itself can add over CAD 100 million or more to earnings by creating some level of free capacity as we improve and the following elements of improvement: utilization to get better reliability on our A220s and exit an intense aircraft reconfiguration cycle, secondly, upgauge to larger aircraft on existing routes, and finally, reduce seasonality with the introduction of a year-round service on A321XLRs for certain transatlantic routes. Okay, let's talk about fleet modernization. Air Canada is targeting 30 billion more ASMs from best-in-class strategically selected aircraft.
The 787-10, A321XLR, the 737 MAX, and the A220s each is expected to deliver 15%-20% better fuel and maintenance cost than the composite average of the current fleet. The cost profile of these aircraft will contribute over 50 basis points to margin expansion by 2028. Finally, we see significant labor productivity across the airline as we add scale, fly a more optimal schedule, and gain the benefits of significant technology investments that can transform the way we work in our operations and in our offices. We will be targeting 3%+ productivity across our workforce. We believe that this can contribute approximately 100 basis points of margin expansion by 2028. Craig will lay out our roadmap toward productivity and operational excellence later this morning.
In aggregate, by 2028, we believe that we can add up to CAD 1 billion in incremental adjusted EBITDA by leveraging growth, the benefits of scale, modern aircraft, technology investments, and operational excellence. Before moving on, perhaps a little nuance on our productivity journey. This chart shows the relative productivity gains measured as available seat miles over full-time equivalent headcount. Our productivity journey will develop in two phases, the first of which began in 2024 and will continue through the first half of 2026. We gained productivity from restoring our pre-pandemic system-wide capacity and from continuous improvement in operational performance.
But since much of the recovered capacity comes from short-haul flying, net productivity gains are still fairly modest. In that same period, we are also investing workforce energy towards growth readiness as we prepare to enter the 787-10s and the A321XLRs into service and towards developing and implementing new technology platforms.
The training time for new crews serving the new aircraft and the time invested in developing and implementing modern technologies does put a cap on productivity gains in the short term. However, from the summer of 2026 through the end of the decade, we see a faster rate of productivity improvement as we leverage network and capacity growth combined with productivity benefits of increased long-haul flying capacity and reap the benefits of more efficient systems and work processes. This is another very important chart. Having provided a roadmap for Adjusted EBITDA growth from CAD 3.5 billion to CAD 5+ billion from 2024 to 2028, I want to now highlight the quality of our earnings by detailing the proven ability to convert earnings into cash from operations. Historically, Air Canada has delivered a high percentage of cash from operations to Adjusted EBITDA.
There are four good reasons for the strong conversion and that these will persist. The first, revenue growth and Aeroplan membership momentum. Both will continue to provide a working capital cash tailwind. Second, we have a very well-funded pension plan that requires little annual cash funding to support its obligations. Our surplus stands at approximately CAD 4 billion. Third, we have significant tax attributes that will buffer our cash tax burden for the next several years. This will ensure a lower cash tax obligation over this plan period. And fourth and last, the strength and quality of our balance sheet and our efficient debt structure will minimize the cash cost of interest. So now let's walk through the chart from left to right. We start with estimated cumulative five-year adjusted EBITDA generated by the business at around CAD 21 billion.
Due to our strong capability to convert adjusted EBITDA to cash, we see almost CAD 20 billion in cash from operations. We believe that a conversion rate of approximately 90% is sustainable through 2028 and possibly beyond. Our operating cash flows will be used to invest in the airline. We expect to invest approximately CAD 15 billion in net CapEx over the plan period. That's CAD 18 billion in gross CapEx, less an estimated CAD 3 billion in sales leasebacks to rebalance our owned versus leased fleet mix. Altogether, from 2024 through 2028, Air Canada is targeting CAD 4 billion-CAD 5 billion in free cash flow available for debt reduction and shareholder returns. Over the next five years, over the next five-year period, I should say, including 2024 through to 2028, Air Canada expects to invest approximately CAD 18 billion in gross CapEx. You can see it on this chart.
We're confident that our capital allocation strategy will create significant value for many years to come. Again, as shown on this chart, we estimate that approximately 50% of the spend is toward growth-oriented investments, and those are primarily aircraft. The remaining 50% of CapEx is geared toward protecting our current business and our operating capabilities. A few highlights to note. As I mentioned, aircraft make up approximately 9 of the $18 billion CapEx envelope and drive our system-wide capacity from 99 billion ASMs in 2023 to 130 billion ASMs in 2028. I have some more details on the fleet additions in an upcoming slide. So going on from there, we also anticipate approximately CAD 1 billion in technology investments. We expect to spend over CAD 1 billion in aircraft reconfiguration and upgrades and CAD 1 billion in maintaining our infrastructure, as well as making new investments in lounges and airport facilities.
Over this period, we will invest approximately one quarter of our CapEx in protecting the reliability and the value of our fleet through scheduled maintenance. From a prior chart, you'll recall that revenues from new capacity generated over CAD 1 billion in adjusted EBITDA, and our margin expansion plan driven by these investments also delivers approximately CAD 1 billion. Overall, these investments drive over CAD 2 billion in annual incremental adjusted EBITDA contribution by 2028 and for many years thereafter. Okay, this is a nice illustration of our fleet evolution. The chart illustrates why the fleet strategy is so important as a growth driver to our plan. These are all best-of-breed aircraft providing a competitive advantage as they fulfill our network strategy. In total, we expect to add approximately 90 new aircraft by 2028. These will include 12 737 MAXs, 36 A220s, 25 321XLRs, and 14 787-10s.
Pausing here for a second, the 787-10 order of 18 aircraft was to be completed by 2027, but we are conservatively planning for a more extended delivery timeframe, and as such, we will likely see the delivery of the last four aircraft beyond 2028. Mark Galardo will provide more color on the fleet and network plan later. Given long lead times for new aircraft and given our desire to maintain a long-term view of the business, we are always active in fleet planning strategy. Beyond 2028, we see three focus areas. One, adding ultra-long-haul capabilities as a part of our wide-body replacement strategy. Two, a narrow-body replacement for the expected end-of-life of our classic A320 and A321 fleet. And finally, we will continue to optimize our regional fleet as we consider mainline A220s for additional key transborder and domestic routes currently serviced by CRJs and ERJs.
As we develop those future plans, we will do so with a focus on disciplined CapEx allocation, maintaining CapEx spend levels below 12% of revenue per year, and we also integrate flexibility into our fleet plans, as shown on this chart. It shows our ability to flex our capacity up or down, depending on economic demand and the reality of the economic and the demand realities over time. Our current plan shows an ability to flex down capacity to about 115 billion ASMs or to flex it up to between 135 billion and 140 billion ASMs as needed. Our primary levers to manage capacity up or down include the timing of retirement of older aircraft, lease exits or extensions, utilizing the flexibility of our aircraft contractual book of options or purchase rights.
Of course, we are always working with the OEM partners in optimizing deliveries based on their production schedules and our ability to enter aircraft into service. This is an important slide as well. Our current equity in the fleet is sitting high and sits at about 80% of owned aircraft on a net book value basis. This has evolved from more than approximately 60%-70% ownership pre-pandemic. During the pandemic, we did use our leased aircraft to pare down capacity and exit older aircraft. Flexibility was helpful. During the recovery, given very tight OEM supply and long lead time requirements for new aircraft, we have been preferential to placing our new orders for new capacity to be delivered in the second half of the decade. This approach allows us more control over delivery slots and adds some additional certainty on price and terms.
As we start to take delivery of new aircraft, we want to restore the agility that a balanced leased versus owned fleet mix provides. Therefore, we will consider sales leaseback transactions for certain aircraft. Our plan includes approximately CAD 3 billion in sales leasebacks, includes also a target of 50% leased A321XLRs, and the remaining 12 737 MAXs will be fully leased as well. Our total target fleet ownership is around 65% or approximately 2/3 of the net book value of our fleet. Okay, moving on to technology investments and our plan. Our plan includes over CAD 1 billion in technology investments over from 2024 to 2028. You should expect about 1% of revenue invested annually in modernizing our systems, supporting Aeroplan growth, and improving our customer experience. Mark Nasr will provide some color around our technology roadmap and our execution strategies. Let's take one last deep dive into CapEx.
We'll be investing approximately CAD 1 billion in the current existing fleet. These investments will delight our customers by delivering fleet-wide fast Wi-Fi and improving the cabin and seating experience on our existing aircraft. We are confident that these investments will generate value for customers, support our yield growth ambitions throughout the plan, and maintain Air Canada standing as a world-class global carrier. Let me now shift gears and spend some time on our balance sheet strategy. You'll recognize the discipline and the responsible risk profile that you have come to appreciate from Air Canada. The cornerstones of our strategy are clear. We have created an exceptional resilience by establishing a deep and broad pool of rapidly accessible liquidity should that need ever arise. We are focused on delivering reliable free cash flow and building our business such that free cash flow generation is structural over time.
Third, we'll always be mindful of overall gross debt levels even as we grow, and we will manage a responsible balance sheet with a net leverage target of less than two turns. Fourth and finally, capital allocation will prioritize a healthy balance sheet, quality investments in the airline, and returning cash to shareholders. We are targeting a ROIC of 12% or better, and we are targeting to return to pre-pandemic share count levels with these actions. Okay, so let me now dive into some of these strategies. Let me touch on some of the key elements. Air Canada will target a minimum liquidity level of 15% of revenues, including our available but unused CAD 1.4 billion credit revolver.
You can see on this chart that based on our planned free cash flow generation, our planned CapEx, our target net debt reduction and refinancing actions, and our share buyback plans, we expect to have sufficient liquidity to continue to provide adequate financial flexibility. Our confidence in a more efficient use of capital and lower minimum liquidity is further supported by an intentional deep liquidity pool that has been fortified over the last few years. Beyond the immediate liquidity provided from cash on hand and our revolver, we have built a deep and broad pool of accessible liquidity. Our slots, gates, and routes facility is only partially used and has significant accessible capacity for additional upsizing. Over the last few years, we have paid out financing on many aircraft and now have a significant unencumbered asset pool that can be quickly levered.
And of course, our Aeroplan franchise is wholly owned by Air Canada and is leverage-free. Altogether, one could estimate that we have approximately CAD 15 billion in untapped financing at our disposal. Of course, we have no plans to use it at this time. Here's a good look at our gross debt at December 2023, sitting at CAD 14 billion. Our plan seeks to keep gross debt levels relatively stable at around CAD 14 billion and keep net leverage at below two turns. This includes any capital lease obligations and potential financing. We ended Q3 2024 with 376 million fully diluted shares outstanding.
We are targeting to deploy over CAD 2 billion in anti-dilutive measures over the next four years. Prior charts demonstrated our free cash flow generation roadmap, our liquidity targets, and our net leverage expectations. We have built in more than CAD 2 billion for allocation to buybacks within our balance sheet strategy.
We are already making quick progress in anti-dilutive capital deployment. As you are aware, in Q3, we launched an NCIB for up to 10% of our float. Since then, we've already retired almost 50 million shares, and we expect the remaining 20 million share capacity under the current NCIB to be fully utilized. We will be opportunistic in removing dilution at the maturity of our convertible bond in May 2025. Finally, under the strength of our liquidity and future expected cash flows, we will opportunistically pursue follow-on programs as appropriate with the objective of a 20% reduction of our share count down to below 300 million shares. I am confident in our plan aimed at executing strategic airline investments for growth and cost reduction while concurrently rewarding shareholders.
Before I wrap up my presentation and provide our guidance on 2025, I'd like to spend a moment on discussing the normalization of adjusted net income adjusted in 2025. In 2019, we produced CAD 3.6 billion in adjusted EBITDA and generated just over CAD 900 million in adjusted net income . As a result of the pandemic, we incurred significant losses and we reduced our fleet size. As we became profitable in 2023 and in 2024, the unrecognized tax assets absorbed book tax expense as it was incurred. We therefore did not have any book tax expense. We also had significantly lower depreciation versus 2019. In Q3 2024, we rolled up our tax asset by over CAD 1.1 billion to reflect reliable tax attributes in future years. This tax asset will translate into non-cash tax expense over the next three to four years.
In 2025, we will also be well into our multi-year fleet investment cycle, and higher CapEx will drive a trend of increasing non-cash depreciation expense. Finally, we have kept an elevated cash on hand balance over the last two years, and this has kept some net interest costs low. As we deploy the excess liquidity, we will see some higher net interest expense increases in the coming years. In short, 2025 adjusted net income will be comparable to 2018, 2019 levels given similar adjusted EBITDA generation. 2025 will be a reset in both adjusted net income and EPS relative to 2023 and 2024 levels. Okay, as I wrap up our long-term plan review, I'd like to leave you with a few key messages. Number one, Air Canada has never had a stronger, more competitive foundation on which to launch growth and drive value creation.
We are confident in our right to win in key markets, and we are strategically investing to capture our fair share of these opportunities. We have laid out our strong path to world-class profitability, leveraging scale, a modern fleet, productivity through technology, and operational excellence, and industry-leading revenue management capabilities and tools, and finally, we are focused on execution and making targeted investments to enable our success. This plan is geared towards value creation for our shareholders, producing 15% EPS CAGR from 2025 to 2028 and delivering CAD 5 of free cash flow per share as we grow revenue 7%-8%, expand margins by 300 basis points, and generate significant free cash flow while reducing share count by 20%. Briefly, let me update you on 2024 financial performance and tee up our 2025 guidance. We are reaffirming our 2024 guide from our Q3 release.
Adjusted EBITDA at approximately CAD 3.5 billion, adjusted CASM approximately 2% higher than 2023, ASM operating capacity approximately 5% higher year over year, and we have not changed any of our assumptions. Today, we're providing 2025 guidance as follows. Adjusted EBITDA in the range of CAD 3.4 billion-CAD 3.8 billion, adjusted CASM of between CAD 14.25 and CAD 14.50 , ASM operated capacity growth of between 3% and 5% versus 2024, and we are also guiding on free cash flow at breakeven CAD ±200 million. We have also provided our assumptions on this chart. Thank you for your attention today. I hope that you are as excited as I am about the potential value creation that lies ahead for Air Canada and its investors. I'm confident in our plan.
Our team has collaborated closely to create a highly integrated strategy that leverages our competitive strengths, deploys a disciplined and responsible financial strategy, drives operational excellence, and delivers strong shareholder value. We are focused on execution, and we will maintain a continuous and open dialogue on our progress. I'm sure that you'll find the following presentations very interesting and compelling against our investment thesis. With that, let's take a glimpse at our international expansion with a short video, and following that, my colleague Mark Galardo, our EVP Revenue and Network Planning and President of Cargo, will come to the stage. Thank you.
Hello, [Foreign language] . We are thrilled to be the first. 2025. Air Canada's newest Asia-Pacific service from Vancouver to Manila will be on board the very comfortable 787 Dreamliner. The flight time will be 13 hours and 25 minutes.
We are so excited to welcome you on board to Manila in 2025. [Foreign language]
For those who know me, aviation has been a lifelong passion of mine. I started in 2004 as a summer intern at Air Canada, and 21 years later, I have responsibility for network planning, alliances, revenue management, sales, cargo, and Air Canada vacations. During my 20-year career at Air Canada, I've had the great fortune of leading various teams that have built the Air Canada of today. From our initial phase of growth to 2019 and through the darkest days of the pandemic, my team and I always believed that Air Canada's best days were yet to come, and today, I'm pleased to stand before you today to speak about the incredible journey that will take us to new frontiers.
Air Canada is a world-class airline that competes on the global stage. We have grown beyond our roots as Canada's flag carrier to build a leading network that spans all six continents and, in doing so, can rival some of the greatest international carriers. The new frontiers plan is the next evolution of Air Canada's journey to further cement our position as a leading international airline, leveraging our growing home market, our natural geographic advantage, and our iconic brand. Over the next four years, we are targeting revenues of roughly CAD 30 billion and ASM increases of 5%-6% per year. As we embark on this journey, we begin by playing to our strengths. Through our extensive investments made to date in fleet, hubs, product, technology, Aeroplan, and cargo, Air Canada has arguably the strongest foundation in its history.
We are guided by our right to win network strategy, whereby we leverage the strength of our current market position and our unique geography. The combination of these two elements presents numerous growth opportunities in the years ahead. We project that demand to, from, and within Canada will continue to grow faster than GDP. Demographic growth in our country, combined with decades of past, present, and future immigration, is expected to translate into higher growth for international demand. And furthermore, as John illustrated in his presentation, we're still not back to 2019 levels. We retired a significant number of aircraft during the pandemic. As we looked ahead, there was substantial catch-up not only to 2019 levels of capacity, but also to the GDP growth that this country has experienced in the last five years. And as you'll see throughout this presentation, we're also blessed with great geography.
We believe we have a unique opportunity and a natural right to win on Sixth Freedom traffic. And increasing our Sixth Freedom share grows our addressable market and plays an important role in diversifying our customer base. These three elements combined set the foundation for growth in the years to come. But before we go into how we will execute this new frontiers plan, I'd like to walk you through some of the strongest elements of our foundation. Air Canada's network diversity is one of our greatest assets. We're not overly dependent on any one geographic sector to drive overall revenue and financial performance. In recent years, we've mitigated changing economic and geopolitical conditions in certain countries. We've moved capacity into sectors of strength while even dealing with the significant constraint that the Russia overflight prohibition has put on us.
In 2023, the transatlantic showed great promise, and we fully seized that opportunity. Early in 2024, as the transatlantic started to show signs of yield normalization, we offset this by diverting capacity into the Asia-Pacific region. And in 2025, we are expecting some yield normalization on Asia-Pacific as capacity and demand continues to rebalance. But this will be offset by the strength in the transborder sector, where corporate demand today is recovering strongly, and as well across the transatlantic, which represents a key contributor to Air Canada's profitability. Overall, early signals for 2025 lead us to have an optimistic outlook for the year. And our network diversity is the key to our success, enabling us to mitigate market-specific risks and seize opportunities in the years ahead. And we've also built up scale in some of the best international hubs on this continent.
Our three-hub strategy gives us tremendous access to global markets. Today, our Toronto Pearson hub is one of the largest international hubs in North America, just behind New York. The greater Toronto area is one of the fastest and largest growing metro areas in North America and is the main nerve center of operations. Not long ago, Montreal would not have even appeared on this list. When I started in 2004, Montreal only had three daily international destinations. This summer, it had 27 and was a top five transatlantic hub on the continent. Meanwhile, our Vancouver hub is the second largest Pacific gateway on the continent, just behind San Francisco, but this has been the result of nearly a decade's worth of investment in scale at each of these hubs, and we firmly believe that there's so much more to achieve in each of these.
And as we combine the size and relevance of our hubs with our market position in Canada's largest three metro areas, we grow our addressable market in sizable fashion. Our presence in the world's most lucrative aviation market is also a major element of our foundation. With coast-to-coast reach, we offer the most diverse and comprehensive network to the United States from any international market. By 2028, we're targeting to serve more than 60 destinations. And as we combine this comprehensive reach with our wide-spanning international network, we create sizable and substantial opportunities for Sixth Freedom traffic growth. In recent years, we've also made major investments in new aircraft and in the simplification of our fleet. This has allowed us to make significant economic gains and is undoubtedly contributing to our recent financial results.
We've fully modernized our narrowbody fleet through the 737 MAX and A220 types, which has improved CASM, but it's also extended the range performance of our narrowbody fleet, enabling us to do so much more. We simplified Rouge as a narrowbody operator only, getting away from the major seasonal utilization swings that our 767 widebody fleet was once generating, and we considerably reduced our exposure to less efficient regional airplanes. Despite this, our fleet remains considerably smaller relative to 2019. This was not by design, but rather as a result of later than expected deliveries of various aircraft that were ordered in recent years. Our investment in future fleet will build on the economic and operational efficiency of our current fleet. The success of our own network is also enhanced through the reach of our partnership portfolio, which is diverse and it continues to grow.
In recent years, we've signed a joint business agreement with United on the Canada-USA corridor. We launched a strategic relationship with Emirates and a variety of intermodal connectivity partners in various countries. Today, our joint venture portfolio with the Lufthansa Group, United Airlines, and Air China, and our leadership position as a founding member of Star Alliance are key elements of our revenue streams. In total, our partners contribute more than 20% of our passenger revenues. We leverage these partnerships to widen our network, enabling greater reach and more itineraries to places where Air Canada is not present itself today, offering more ways for our customers to get to where they want to go. The strong foundation we've built over time helps us enable our future growth, and today we are well equipped to head towards new frontiers.
As we look ahead to the future, we will leverage our unique strengths and industry tailwinds to seize right to win opportunities as we target CAD 30 billion in revenue by 2028. We will build upon strong core Canadian demand, especially on international network, as we catch up to 2019 levels. We also plan on capturing the consumer shift towards premium products with our position as Canada's leading premium carrier. Our award front of cabin offer enables us to remain the carrier of choice for high-yield customers, and lastly, our unique geography creates an opportunity to flow Sixth Freedom, leveraging our robust U.S. and international networks, and to tap into additional pools of travel demand. Canada has been the fastest-growing country in the G7. Shortly, we will be welcoming our 42nd millionth person in this country, which represents a growth of roughly four million people since 2019.
Canada's multicultural diversity is a cornerstone of Air Canada's strategy. With an economy fueled by immigration, we expect Canada will continue to evolve demographically as immigration patterns change the composition of our country. This is not a new phenomenon. It's been the story of our country for decades. And what we're talking about here is immigration that has already occurred. This benefits Air Canada today. There is significant international demand to and from Canada relative to our population size. And with yield potential that supports our success, we have a proven track record in these markets. And we project that international demand will continue to grow at a faster pace than GDP, which opens several new viable growth opportunities globally. And as we mentioned, Air Canada also benefits from highly advantageous geography atop some of the most lucrative passenger flows across the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Our unique hub geography on both coasts of North America means Sixth Freedom travelers are already overflying our hubs, and we are on the shortest path of travel. When we dig into the numbers, we see that our hubs are well positioned for potentially 80% of the addressable U.S. market. This means that just from our geography, we can offer highly competitive lap times basically anywhere. Long-term, we are targeting growth to more than 2% of this addressable market. This can represent a nearly CAD 1 billion revenue opportunity for Air Canada and in the current environment in which we expect this to grow in the years to come. Sixth Freedom is important as it enlarges our addressable market. For each decimal point of a market share that we gain, Air Canada increases its reach to millions of additional travelers outside the Canadian borders.
It's precisely this synergy between our strength in the Canadian market and our growing Sixth Freedom penetration that gives us formidable growth potential in this plan. And our three complementary hubs are strategically designed to play to the geographic strengths and flow this traffic. Toronto, where we are today, is not only the shortest path to Europe, but also finds itself along the fastest path to the eastern seaboard to Asia. To our northeast, our Montreal hub has a clear advantage in capturing Atlantic traffic, finding itself directly on the path to Europe. And on Canada's west coast, our Vancouver hub provides efficient connections to the Asia-Pacific region. In this illustrative slide, we show six itineraries, such as Detroit to Barcelona, St. Louis to Madrid, and Austin to Seoul. These are representative samples of what we believe applies to the majority of itineraries to and from the U.S.
A connection via our hubs is the most efficient connection on a total mileage and circuity basis. And building upon years of investment that cemented the strongest foundation in our history, we're now ready to unlock Air Canada's full potential. New frontiers will keep building upon the fleet and network investments that we've made to support our continued trajectory towards a leading international carrier. As John mentioned, new frontiers will create significant value, driving margin growth and enhanced profitability. We estimate that our plan can drive upward of CAD 2 billion of gross EBITDA at maturity, largely driven by the exceptional efficiencies found in this fit-for-purpose fleet. On the road to value creation, our fleet strategy is a core contributor to EBITDA increase.
This is driven by the arrival of two next-generation aircraft types into our fleet, such as the 787-10 Dreamliner, which complements our existing Dreamliner fleet, and the Airbus A321XLR, which will grow our ability to efficiently connect long and thin markets. Our fleet strategy not only brings financial benefits, but also brings benefits to our customers, unlocking new destinations and allowing us to improve our existing services and onboard products. For instance, we will also continue to expand our A220 fleet, and we will be transferring our Boeing 737 MAX aircraft to Rouge to better position the brand for our customers in the leisure segment. And looking beyond 2030, we're also exploring options for a new ultra long-haul aircraft. These will be critical to support our continued strategy to reach fast-growing international markets. The Boeing 787-10 is an exceptional airplane.
It's one of the most efficient widebody aircraft we have studied and the standard in terms of economic efficiency in the 787 family. With a large cabin between doors one and two, this airplane will be positioned in premium markets such as London Heathrow, Tokyo, Frankfurt, to name just a few. Not only does it offer more seats versus the current 787-9 or the current Airbus A330, it's also an exceptional cargo airplane offering two more pallet positions versus the current A330. This fleet is at the center of the value creation narrative, and the A321XLR is also an exciting evolution for Air Canada. It allows us to grow into various international markets without the economic risk of a larger widebody aircraft. It helps us mitigate our seasonality, offering more destinations with greater frequency and, in most cases, on a year-round basis.
And as we will feature a new lie-flat seat on this airplane, it will allow Air Canada to improve its product offering on various North American routes, such as California, domestic transcon flights, and possibly even some routes into the Caribbean. Furthermore, with Montreal and Toronto along the shortest paths on the transatlantic corridor, Air Canada has a unique competitive advantage to reach more destinations in Europe and Africa by fully leveraging the exceptional range of the A321XLR. The A220, a Canadian-built aircraft, and arguably the ideal narrowbody aircraft for Air Canada. It has tremendous versatility, enabling Air Canada to open new routes at a lower risk, grow frequency in high-volume shuttle markets, and vastly improve the economic profile of serving routes otherwise operated today with regional airplanes.
Over the period, we expect our A220 fleet to grow towards 70 units and it'll also help us increase our size and scale in the U.S. Our customers love this airplane. We're of the view that the A220 is one of the best narrowbody products in terms of customer experience, and this airplane elevates the Air Canada brand. The A220 is a key ingredient to our Sixth Freedom success and helps ensure that we maintain the widest network reach here in the Canadian domestic market. The A220 economic profile has already proven itself at Air Canada, enabling us to offer city pairs right size for this type of airplane. For example, we were able to launch flights from Toronto to Monterrey, Mexico, and from Montreal to Austin, Texas, with results above a comparable peer set.
We're looking forward to having a Vancouver base by 2026 and to be able to offer a great A220 experience across our three hubs. The leisure market in Canada continues to be intensely competitive. For leisure carriers around the world, the 737 MAX is the gold standard in terms of economic and operational efficiencies. Today, much of Rouge's current fleet is approaching end of life or is limited in terms of range, hindering Rouge's economic and operational competitiveness. By moving the 737 MAX to Rouge, we will be able to reduce our variable CASM significantly, increase our seat count, and offer a much improved competitive tool to address the leisure market. Furthermore, this gives us the flexibility to operate a Vancouver base with the airplane, improving our competitiveness and our rangeability in this market and in Western Canada at large.
With the 737 MAX, we consolidate from today's three fleet types at Rouge to one single fleet type, and this will allow us to run higher utilization schedules and substantially reduce the seasonality swings that we found at Rouge prior to the pandemic. With our much improved fleet, combined with our geographic advantage, we're presented with a variety of viable new international opportunities. With the evolution of our widebody fleet, we will continue to capitalize on growing Asia from Vancouver, expanding our footprint into India, and unlocking a growing and yet underserved market for Air Canada Africa, and with the 321XLR, we will grow our European footprint from our Montreal and Toronto hubs and open some unique and very exciting destinations where today, utilizing a widebody would be economically prohibitive.
By the end of 2028, Air Canada will have one of the most impressive international route networks among peer global carriers, and we're very excited by this. Air Canada is Canada's leading provider of premium capacity, with a number of key attributes that support an award-winning front of cabin offer for our customers. Looking ahead, we are well positioned to take advantage of these consumer shifts towards higher-yielding products. We plan to grow our premium capacity by approximately 20%-25% by 2028, and we're currently in the process of evaluating the options at our disposal to drive more of this capacity on our current widebody fleet. My colleague Mark Nasr will take you through, in more detail, our continued investment and our premium experience.
On the revenue side, we expect this segment to continue to deliver tailwinds in the years to come, continuing the post-pandemic trend that we are currently experiencing. Business traffic continues to recover, and in the years to come, we are putting in place the right pillars to enhance the revenue contribution from these high-value customers. This year, we already implemented changes to our network to ensure our schedule supports business travel, increasing same-day travel options by more than 10%. We also soft-launched a new offer for small and medium-sized businesses to enhance our relationship with these very important customers, the bedrock of the Canadian economy. As a testament to the success of this program, we've already signed more than 1,000 new accounts.
For larger corporate accounts, we are refreshing the contracting process to monetize more value drivers like lounge access and to better align the unique needs of our corporate clients. All these changes will further support a rebound in business travel, enhancing the quality of our revenue and supporting yield growth. Air Canada has a long history in revenue management excellence, an innovation that's at the forefront of our Canadian peers. When we last spoke at Investor Day in 2022, we shared our historical innovation from leg-based to origin-destination-based revenue management. Since then, we recently implemented AI-driven upselling, as well as further enhanced our branded fares to better segment our customers. We continue to believe that there's still so much more to be done within our portfolio of branded fares as we transport a variety of different customer types to a widening range of global destinations.
We will be increasingly moving from a one-size-fits-all branded fare model to a segmentation-based model to ensure we offer attributes to our customer values depending on the markets that we serve. There is still considerable revenue upside in our branded fares optimization process, and moving forward, we went live with continuous pricing, and we will go live across the network this year, and it's already contributing to our performance in a few markets, and the full rollout will occur next year to maximize the flexibility that we have with the current class-based revenue management structure, and as we look to the future, we know the industry is building towards dynamic solutions. On this, we're continuing to investigate the best path forward for Air Canada. Our innovation in revenue management will continue to leverage modern capabilities and drive enhanced yield growth for Air Canada.
Successfully executing this roadmap will enable us to generate the projected revenue growth for new frontiers. In closing, aviation business is never a straight line. We recognize that along this journey, we will face some uncertainty and risks. However, as demonstrated, Air Canada has never had a stronger foundation than present. The new frontiers plan will not just benefit Air Canada alone. It will also benefit our stakeholders, such as customers, our employees, and our country at large. And our new frontiers plan makes true on the promise that Air Canada's best days are still yet to come. Thank you, and we will now take a 15-minute break.
Welcome to Paris. On the track. (audio distortion ).
Good morning, everyone. I'm Mark Nasr, and I'm responsible for technology, marketing, and loyalty at Air Canada.
I've been at the company for about nine years now, before about a decade at United Airlines, and prior to that in the hospitality industry. Air Canada has the strongest foundations in its history. Mark Galardo outlined the many tools and capabilities at our disposal. During this section, I'm going to expand on our plans in loyalty, product, and technology. These three areas represent key levers that will support revenue diversification, further strengthen our customer experience, and drive the margin expansion that our new frontiers plan will deliver. Let's begin with loyalty and the successful transformation of Aeroplan. We bought Aeroplan in 2019, but the work started years earlier with extensive research and competitive analysis. Our goal was growth-oriented, to earn our way into consumers' lives every day. Put another way, to expand beyond our historic strength with Canadians who flew frequently.
Looking back, the new program design, its digital integrations, and partnerships are performing beyond our expectations. Active member count has more than doubled, and membership became more international. The share of Gen Z members has doubled, reversing a worrying trend prior to the acquisition and supporting future growth as younger cohorts mature and their wealth grows. And purchase volumes on our co-branded credit cards are up by 50%. I mentioned geographical diversification. Aeroplan now works with all three major payment networks in the world and offers co-branded cards in the United States, as well through Star Alliance in Australia. We participate in the leading bank proprietary programs around the world. These partnerships accelerate our growth. This diversification also helps us insulate in the event of lower economic growth or interchange rate pressure in Canada.
Additionally, Aeroplan is seeing traction in markets that are core to our network strategy, supporting Air Canada demand generation and brand recognition around the world. While Aeroplan itself is a compelling business, along with our product and schedule, they form the core of our customer value proposition. The symbiosis between the program and the airline is undeniable. As a customer becomes more engaged in Aeroplan, they tend to travel more, and they purchase higher-yielding products. It's pretty intuitive if you think about it. For example, our premium co-brand credit card is CAD 599 annually. Once a customer upgrades, they, and importantly, their travel companions, enjoy a market-leading set of benefits on every trip. What's more, there's a behavioral desire to amortize that annual fee to the greatest extent possible. Even the mass-tier products drive similar behaviors. We consistently observe Air Canada's spend acceleration after a member acquires the co-branded card.
Aeroplan membership is also key to driving premium cabin demand. In fact, member spend share in premium cabins is about 2.5x non-member spend share in the front. And that right there is the Aeroplan flywheel effect. Enrollment drives more Air Canada purchases. Engagement with one element of the program begets activity with another element of the program. And point redemptions drive the subsequent acceleration in point accrual. We're delivering on our brand promise, travel more, travel better. That being said, there's so much more ahead for Aeroplan. We're effectively at the top of the fourth year, or as the Canadian analysts may prefer, in the second period. We're focusing on four key areas to improve the program and further accelerate growth. Let's explore each one. First, we're asking ourselves what more the program can do to support the airline's core business.
We all recognize that travel loyalty programs have excelled at driving profits for co-brand cards, as well as rewarding frequent flyer behavior. Ironically, however, leading airlines have been victims of their own success in this regard. One could argue that travel loyalty programs have not been as successful as their retail cousins. Leading retail programs are particularly adept at reducing dilutions, driving incrementality, and growing mass brand loyalty. In fact, some of our research suggests that Aeroplan retail partners leverage our own points more optimally to drive their businesses than we do. We believe there's a significant opportunity to use Aeroplan to drive more profitable behavior for the airline by changing how we reward members. Over the next couple of years, we'll revamp how members earn points, focusing in particular on the mix of base miles and bonus earn.
We'll also optimize our highly regarded elite status program, simplifying the design and adding additional rewards between and above existing tier levels. Finally, we'll remove the friction points for members, as the 2020 relaunch left some white space that wasn't addressed. These changes will reinforce Aeroplan as the best-in-class program for road warriors, while expanding its appeal to the 93% of Canadian travelers who fly on three trips a year or less. Second, a robust set of partners offering meaningful awards is a great member engagement tool. The initial phase of our partnership strategy is nearly complete. We have more airline partners than any program on earth. We work with the most comprehensive set of lodging and ground transportation providers in the industry, and we offer Canada's largest and highest quality selection of retail and everyday partners. These drive constant program relevance in between trips.
As we look to the future, our partnership strategy will evolve. It will become more targeted and involve a novel development approach focusing on three areas. First, high-potential segments for Aeroplan. This includes an emphasis on small and medium-sized businesses. Second, improving coordination during travel. This includes collaborating more closely with airport authorities and concessionaires, as well as pursuing new types of partnerships, like our latest intermodal alliances with train operators and bus lines that Mark spoke about. Third, innovative companies and ideas. We aim to identify early-stage value propositions capable of driving Aeroplan's core revenue streams. For example, we recently partnered with a novel consumer platform that has the potential to grow co-brand purchase volumes and provide great value to existing Aeroplan partners. This relationship includes an ownership stake and is structured for long-term value creation. As we explore additional opportunities, we'll share further developments in due course.
We're always looking around the corner, and this element of our strategy can also help Aeroplan and its partners manage potential market disruption. Moving on to number three, significantly growing redemption volumes while also expanding margin. Four key areas of focus here, starting with additional inventory from our airline partners. Today, Aeroplan offers every seat on every Air Canada flight. We are starting to work with additional partners, we're starting to work with partners, rather, on offering additional inventory on their networks. Second, we're enabling seamless redemptions for everyday purchases. For example, Aeroplan points can now be used at the LCBO, the world's largest beverage alcohol retailer. We're also expanding hotel, car, and vacation packages. This area has been the fastest growing in recent years as we've launched Aeroplan Hotel Savers and further integration into Air Canada Vacations channels.
And then finally, one of the major benefits of the Aeroplan acquisition was the intellectual capital, the awesome team. We have an industry-leading points management practice. Responsible for all inflows and outflows of the program, they apply revenue management and behavioral psychology principles to optimize financial results. In the last five years, they've built several new tools and capabilities that have allowed us to expand margin without sacrificing our value proposition. And they have additional projects underway, allowing us to more intelligently price and display our redemption offerings. This practice is a real differentiator for Air Canada, and its deep integration with our revenue management team means effectively one plus one equals three. The fourth pillar of our loyalty strategy will utilize the Aeroplan platform to engage in natural adjacencies and unlock new revenue streams. Here are two examples.
First, we recognize an opportunity to sell advertising placements to third parties throughout the travel experience. Air Canada attracts the most sought-after audiences in the country: higher incomes, new immigrants, families, and influencers of all kinds. Furthermore, we can leverage select data from Aeroplan and Air Canada to offer targeted and customized ad products. We'll combine this with new technologies to provide performance reporting to marketers similar to a retail media network. While this initiative hasn't been discussed publicly, it's been in development for the past two years, and it's already showing promising returns. Additionally, we're evaluating opportunity in the dining and lifestyle sectors. Both are rapidly expanding and crucial to driving premium card acquisition and high-value customer engagement. Air Canada has a natural strength in this space with the reference list of best new restaurants and bars in Canada.
By leveraging our content and relationships, we aim to deepen the appeal of Aeroplan's premium products. Since its acquisition five years ago, Aeroplan is a story of transformation delivered. We've simultaneously grown membership and third-party remuneration volumes whilst expanding margins. There are compelling opportunities ahead to grow the program and its contribution to Air Canada. As we look forward to 2028, we're forecasting that third-party remuneration will grow 1.5x on top of our now larger base. Let's talk about product. Air Canada was arguably the first North American airline to recognize the premium product megatrend. Nearly two decades ago, we were first to introduce flatbed seating, first to introduce all-aisle access, and the first network carrier to embrace seatback entertainment across the fleet. We are the North American premium leader, and we're best in class across the Atlantic.
We'll continue to invest in product where we see a return, as well as to support our growth ambitions. In the upcoming years, we'll focus on four main areas: airport lounges, aircraft cabins, in-flight Wi-Fi, and our food and beverage offering. It's important to note that we're the only Canadian carrier with our own lounge product and network. Lounges are our most popular premium product. We see customer interest, more of it in lounges, than ever before. Customers that visit a lounge generate 20% higher spend per booking, so the quality of their ticket purchases is higher. Many more high-value customers use our lounge than fly in our business class cabins. After acquiring Aeroplan, we added lounge access as a benefit on our premium credit card. Since 2019, that portfolio has grown over 300%, far outpacing our entry and core cards.
Over the next three years, we'll add nine net new lounges, we'll renovate eight lounges, and in total, that would expand overall lounge capacity by 43% while adding key points on the map. This is particularly important when you consider the space constraints at most major airports around the world now, leaving little room for lounge expansion. There's tremendous competition between airlines, between banks, and with third-party operators for that space, so this is a real competitive advantage for us. We're investing in cabin optimization to improve the customer experience and drive the right commercial outcomes. LOPA design has long been a competitive strength for Air Canada. Our team obsesses about every cubic inch on board. New deliveries or reconfigurations will offer higher revenue generation potential, with a particular focus on capturing premium revenues and growing ancillary.
Critically, however, we won't sacrifice the LOPA efficiency we've become known for throughout the industry. Earlier, Mark Galardo discussed our successes with premium revenues and their future contributions. Here are three applied examples demonstrating the expected growth scale. Over the next few years, we'll be receiving 787-10s. Compared to the -9s acquired in the last decade, overall capacity will increase by 11%. However, our premium cabin capacity will grow by more than 30%. We plan to reconfigure our existing 777-300s, adding 98 extra legroom preferred seats in economy. Finally, as part of our transborder and Sixth Freedom strategy, many flights currently operated by 76-seat regional aircraft will be upgaged to new A220s. Aside from its industry-leading cabin, each A220 offer will offer 67% more preferred seats when compared to flights currently operated by Embraer 175s.
We're also working with our joint venture partners, United and the Lufthansa Group, to sell each other's extra legroom seats in our respective digital channels. However, it's not just a new layout with more seats. We're pursuing an end-to-end brand experience redesign that will include every Air Canada touchpoint, both physical and digital. Later in 2025, we'll unveil our new Glowing Hearted design standard. With an emphasis on the textures, colors, and materials found in Canadian nature, this progression will elevate our brand and help ensure that it's well-positioned to support our growth ambitions. It's important to note that we're undertaking these upgrades in a methodical and calculated manner. We'll be taking delivery of about 90 new aircraft over the term of our plan, providing a natural opportunity to introduce a new design standard in a more capital-efficient manner. We're also engineering soft updates to our current dream cabin standard.
These interiors will thus be able to comfortably coexist with Glowing Hearted until they're naturally reconfigured or retired from the fleet. Wi-Fi is critical for business and leisure travelers alike. Just last week, we announced rolling out fast, free Wi-Fi across the entire fleet. Beginning in May 2025, we'll offer free service in North America and some destinations, followed by a global expansion in 2026. While we're far from the first major airline to announce free Wi-Fi, we'll be one of the first to actually provide it consistently to our customers. We expect over 85% of the fleet to be installed by the May launch, with the remaining aircraft substantially completed before year-end. Our approach leverages proven technologies alongside the latest available, so we're well-positioned to swiftly adapt in this fast-changing space.
In addition to the obvious and compelling customer use cases, we plan to use the Wi-Fi platform to unlock new retail and media revenue streams. This, alongside improving operational support for our coworkers. Finally, a note on food and beverage. Briefly, it's a key element to round out our product strategy. Improvement here drives ancillary revenue, with average food checks in economy up 32% since 2019. Craig will emphasize that safety, punctuality, and reliability are always our top priorities. Yet, as we look to increase our mix of promoters, providing better food and beverage services represents a touch of hospitality. These are memorable moments that elevate the travel experience, improve customer satisfaction, and deepen loyalty. This contributes to brand strength and ultimately higher willingness to pay. We are the North American product leaders.
The investment roadmap ensures that we modernize our offering, that we expand our premium potential, and ensures that we have the right proposition for our network growth strategy. Moving on to the third strategic leader, IT, data, and digital. You've already heard from John that we're making investments in technology to support productivity improvements and margin expansion. Let me begin with a well-known fact. Starting in the mid-2000s through to the mid-2010s, Air Canada lagged in technology investment when compared to its peers. This, however, changed beginning in 2015 with transformational projects focused on the commercial space. The work, which included a new revenue management system, reservations, loyalty, and distribution, helped to modernize our commercial capabilities. They served as key contributors to our revenue growth over the last decade. There are two key messages to take away from this slide.
First, Team Air Canada has a demonstrated ability to successfully execute simultaneous large-scale tech projects. We deliver them on time, and we deliver them with the intended benefits. The second key message, we're just beginning to invest in IT, data, and digital capabilities that support our operations and our corporate back office. What's interesting here is if you compare Air Canada to our U.S. peers, their results already reflect well over a decade of investment in these areas. For Air Canada, it's a greenfield opportunity to improve operations productivity and back office efficiency. Speaking of greenfield opportunities, the next horizon of our technology investments is focused on supporting our operations. We aim to achieve significant improvements in productivity and quality while operational teams can make the best calls in real time. We're about 18 months into this effort, which includes re-platforming our core systems.
We'll introduce mobility solutions for our workforce, and we'll create digital twins for improved asset utilization. These investments lay the foundation for AI-driven automation in the ops domain. Additionally, in partnership with airport authorities, we're exploring robotics that assist employees and create safer work environments. Finally, our contact centers and customers will have agentic AI at their disposal. These initiatives are driven by a particularly passionate, highly skilled team with experience from leading carriers across the industry. Craig Landry, our COO, will outline how these efforts support labor productivity goals in his presentation. However, we're not standing still on commercial opportunities. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Due to our investments, we now possess modern, flexible platforms that allow us to add capabilities more quickly than before. In the immediate term, we plan to mature our new distribution capability alongside deploying continuous pricing across the entire system.
I outlined Aeroplan's next phase of growth, expanded redemption options, and partnership opportunities will be supported by new tech. Then, as we approach the end of our planning horizon, we'll implement a modern retailing environment in line with IATA's Offer & Order . This promise is to finally break us and our key partners away from the 1970s data structures and legacy standards, which have long slowed industry innovation. You'll hear a lot more about this from Mark Galardo in the future. The final area where we'll leverage technology for transformative benefit is corporate and back office functions. The marquee project underway now is a new ERP system. This will provide more detailed, timely data to support financial planning, procurement, and taxation functions. What's more, we'll introduce automation capabilities in back offices, such as billing and invoicing, supplier, and contract management.
Moving forward, we'll deploy AI to improve the claims management process for customers and employees. Finally here, we're a people-powered business, so culture is especially critical. Technology will play a role in improving the employee experience and driving engagement with our unique value proposition, like employee travel. As we invest, we're committed to safeguarding our most valuable assets. Our cyber team is strengthening security measures and privacy initiatives. You can see the significant opportunities to invest in technology and generate business value, but we also have to be cognizant of managing the run costs of an expanding technology footprint. With that in mind, we're already pursuing a cost transformation program that will decrease our annual spend relative to revenues. The team has identified dozens of specific initiatives, and we're standing up a dedicated office to ensure we capture them.
Just to give you a quick flavor of the value available to unlock, we're in a transition period between a modern cloud-based infrastructure and a legacy environment with mainframes and data centers. Over the next 18 months, we'll fully complete that transition such that we eliminate the double cost of running two infrastructures in parallel. Second, initially, we heavily relied on third-party providers for our technology transformation of commercial. However, we've since developed our internal skills and our competencies, and this allows us to better balance our internal resources with more costly external support as necessary. These tech investments we're making aim to expand margins, a commitment we make to the entire organization. With extensive experience now in transformational tech programs, we recognize how IT, data, and digital can add value by supporting other divisions.
This confidence is driving us to invest about 1% of revenues over the next five years. Air Canada is a story of commitments kept, building and transforming a loyalty business, building and maintaining the best-in-class product, and executing a hedgehog commercial technology strategy. We have clear plans to leverage these strong foundations to support our next era of growth. Thank you very much, and it's my pleasure now to hand it over to our Chief Operations Officer, Craig Landry. But first, a short video about the team's work in artificial intelligence.
Air Canada's investment in AI underscores its commitment to operational excellence and customer satisfaction. The airline's ongoing AI initiatives promise to revolutionize the future of air travel. With a dedicated team of over 75 data science, machine learning, and data engineering experts that are committed to developing in-house AI solutions that enhance operational efficiencies and customer service.
A key project is the Maintenance Scheduling Assistant, an innovative application that recommends an optimized maintenance plan up to two years in advance, ensuring preparedness for any operational changes. This tool significantly surpasses the industry benchmark of 30-day optimized planning, offering a robust safeguard for customer protection. Additionally, Air Canada has introduced this year an on-time performance schedule optimizer tool. This tool uses simulations and machine learning to carefully assess our schedule's on-time performance, allowing for early improvements to the schedule or its execution. By doing this well in advance, we help ensure a smooth and reliable experience for our customers.
Good morning, everyone. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you all today. For those of you I've not yet had the chance to meet, allow me to introduce myself briefly. I joined Air Canada just over 30 years ago.
My first job was actually in the reservation contact center in Montreal, so my career began on the front line. The first 25 years of my career were on the commercial side of the business with roles in revenue management and network planning before joining the team that spun off Aeroplan through an IPO in 2003. I rejoined Air Canada as VP of Marketing in 2010 as we began a decade of global expansion, and after some time as president of two of our subsidiaries, Air Canada Vacations and Air Canada Rouge, and after 25 years on the commercial side of the company, I moved to the operations world when I took on this COO role in 2019, where my focus has been on delivering a safe, reliable, and efficient operation.
Turning now to the presentation, you'll recall that John walked you through the core elements that will drive margin expansion. I'll now dive a bit deeper and discuss how operations excellence can contribute to this, how through our fleet and supported by innovation, and how all of this will improve our operational efficiency and productivity. Airline operations are very complex, more so for a network carrier like Air Canada. Our airline, together with our regional partners, operates more than 1,000 flights a day using 350 aircraft. An operations team that numbers about 27,000 ensures that the safe and reliable operation of our global network, which reaches 200 destinations worldwide. Our operations business model focuses on three key elements, those being on-time performance, customer satisfaction, and efficiency.
Now, while these elements can compete with each other, a thoughtful balance between them is required to ensure the smooth and the profitable running of an airline. More importantly, these elements can also become self-reinforcing as operational excellence increases customer satisfaction, drives increased productivity, and ultimately margin expansion. We're making strategic investments that drive this kind of virtuous circle as a key contributor of our growth and our margin expansion plan. Let's start by taking a closer look at on-time performance. The industry standard for measuring OTP is the percentage of flights arriving within 14 minutes of scheduled time, known as A14. As you can see here, since 2022, which was a year marked by pandemic-related operational challenges worldwide, OTP has recovered materially. Our current year-to-date OTP stands at 71%, which is a substantial increase of 17 percentage points from just two years ago.
This improvement has been driven by an intense and a focused series of initiatives and strategic investments that have re-engineered many aspects of our customer and our business processes. One such example, as you would have just seen in the video, is our new AI-powered tools such as Chronos AI, our new in-house tool that helps us balance commercial and operational considerations in order to produce an optimal schedule. Another would be our Ops Mod program, which transforms on-the-day decision-making in areas like aircraft swaps and slot utilization. We've also implemented a wide range of technology-driven enhancements that drive down key challenges such as carry-on baggage and documentation-related delays. In 2024, we launched a new internal KPI that we call GO, which uses a range of key metrics to rally and coordinate our teams around efficiently and safely preparing our aircraft for an on-time departure.
Building on our improvements to date, our strategic plan will further strengthen our OTP, beginning with a new data-led integrated planning approach with our commercial colleagues, which will optimize our schedule design. This will allow us to better utilize resources during valleys in the schedule and to better optimize the timing of maintenance activities. This approach will also allow us to push for increased aircraft utilization while better managing gates and slot utilization and making adjustments to improve the efficiency of complex connecting traffic patterns. Turn-time improvements at our airports worldwide will also be a key area of focus, driven by investments in mobility and operational AI, which will transform work patterns, processes, and communication, and of course, the new aircraft entering our fleet will improve dispatch reliability and will reduce our maintenance burden, all of which will contribute to an OTP improvement.
To guide our efforts in the spirit of continuous improvement and to increasingly position ourselves globally, we have set targets for a further two percentage points improvement in each of 2025 and 2026. Improving OTP is a core part of our plan as it contributes to better utilization and also increases customer satisfaction. But importantly, strong OTP also drives better cost performance. When we operate smoothly and on time, we see savings coming from various disruption costs as well as workforce efficiencies. OTP also drives RASM benefits through better connectivity and gains from higher fleet utilization. As a result, OTP and operational improvements will contribute 70 basis points towards our 2028 EBITDA targets. These are included within our network optimization margin expansion that was already mentioned and are over and above the labor productivity savings from these improvements, which I'll speak to in a moment.
The second element I'd like to cover is customer experience and satisfaction. We have a wide range of measures for customer satisfaction, but at a macro level, like many companies, we use a Net Promoter Score, commonly known as NPS. Customer satisfaction starts with reliable operations. Flights that depart and arrive on time are the number one expectation of our customers, table stakes, really. To build an industry-leading service proposition that would go far beyond OTP, in 2022, we created a program called ECX, short for Elevating the Customer Experience. ECX was initiated based on extensive feedback we received from our employees and from our customers, and from that, we built a multi-year program of initiatives designed to address their direct needs while also providing a central rallying point inside of Air Canada.
Elevating the customer experience is important in our highly competitive industry as it reinforces loyalty with our core customer base while helping unlock our right to win as we aggressively compete for customers in new markets. And if we do it right, we simultaneously drive operational efficiencies. In 2023, we saw real progress as we delivered 41 initiatives that improved Air Canada's on-time performance, customer communications, disruption handling and recovery, employee engagement, and service excellence. This program continues in full force today with many new and many maturing initiatives. The positive impact is clear. NPS so far this year is up 10 points over last year. NPS for our strategically important Sixth Freedom connecting customers, anchoring some of our international growth, is up 12 points. Our plan through to 2028 calls for a further overall increase of 13 more points.
So to drill down a bit further, we've identified four drivers of NPS, two related to reducing detractors and two related to increasing promoters. Starting with the detractors, the first and most important factor is OTP, which I've already covered in some detail. The second is related to disruption and recovery. We have three broad ways of approaching disruption. The first is to be preemptive by communicating with customer-facing technology. This can include notifying them of potential issues and providing self-serve options. One example of this is our automated tools for rebooking when schedule changes occur, which puts control back in our customer's hands as they can easily select their alternate flights from a range of choices. Second, once an event happens, we can mitigate the impact.
Just one example of this would be pushing real-time digital coupons for meals, hotels, and local transportation, replacing the long and often frustrating lineups to get a paper-based coupon, and the third area is all the work we undertake with our alliance partners to create and preserve seamless connectivity, which can be a major friction point. Now, moving on to the topic of increasing promoters, we believe a key aspect will be the development of a renewed service culture that is uniquely Canadian and is inspired by our nation's reputation for kindness and hospitality. To that end, we've been piloting a new customer service program called With Care and Class. Following a successful trial of this program in Ottawa, we will begin rolling this out across the Air Canada operation in 2025.
Now, the aim is quite simple: to make travel easy for our customers and to give our employees the discretion and the support they need to achieve customer service excellence. Now, as simple as this might sound, this will require hard work to build the tools, processes, and technology, as well as the training to deliver it. However, we know that a unique service proposition will distinguish Air Canada from our competitors, allowing us to build loyalty, to create real customer value, and ultimately to support our revenue and our premium yield objectives. So, to summarize our efforts in this area, we believe a world-class customer experience is a critical building block in our right-to-win strategy, particularly as we enter new markets and to attract customers from international points of sale. And of course, let's not forget the effect this has in turn on the socioeconomic landscape in Canada.
Now, back to our core airline operation elements. The third core element I'd like to cover relates to improvements in efficiency and productivity. Driving operational efficiency is a critical part of our business model, given the wide range of costs generated by the operation. Our focus is to become increasingly efficient through the scale of our operation and through targeted productivity initiatives. This allows us to increase revenues while keeping costs in check and driving margin expansion. As you can see here, like all the airlines around the world, productivity decreased during the pandemic, given some of the fixed costs we were unable to shed against a significantly reduced flying schedule. Now, since that time, we have restabilized the airline, and we are now on a path towards continuous improvement.
Over the period of 2024 to 2028, we will drive an additional 13% improvement in productivity using the industry standard measure of million ASMs per FTE. Given the delivery and the deployment of additional long-range aircraft specifically towards the end of this decade and additional maturation of key initiatives, we expect that number to rise to 20% by 2030. On an annual basis, this translates into a 3% CAGR rate for the period 2024 to 2028. Of this, over 1% will come from productivity initiatives that we will design and implement. Just under 1% will come from improved operational performance. And just over 1% will come from a more efficient flying schedule enabled by the new aircraft entering the fleet. Allow me to walk you through some concrete examples of how we expect to drive additional efficiencies in our operation.
Over the past few years, our growth has been enabled by the addition of A220 and Boeing 737 aircraft. Now, these aircraft tend to fly short and medium-haul flights, which require a higher volume of fixed takeoff and landing costs in support of multiple flight segments per day. Looking forward, as we take the delivery of the A321XLR and the Boeing 787-10s, we will benefit from natural efficiencies as the fixed costs related to one takeoff and landing are amortized against a far greater output of ASMs. The result is greater productivity on the ground and a natural positive contribution to CASM. In parallel with our new fleet, we will harness the power of AI in a variety of ways.
One such example, as you saw in the video earlier, is in our maintenance business, where improved technology and AI modeling will allow us to deepen our journey on predictive maintenance planning, which will transform our ability to coordinate schedule, parts, and people. Drones are another example of new technology we are already type-trialing for assistance with aircraft inspections. This technology allows us to reduce inspection time, increase accuracy, and ultimately return aircraft back to service more quickly. This, in turn, improves operational reliability and OTP, and it also enables our mechanics to move on to more pressing tasks sooner. In the airport, robotics will transform the way we prepare and load bags into our cargo hold. This will improve efficiencies while also reducing manual strain and injury for employees. Airside, we are exploring the use of autonomous vehicles to improve performance, safety, and efficiency of aircraft servicing activities.
While both of these technologies are still quite new, they do exist, and they are already in use at some airports seen around the world. We will work with our partners to pilot, optimize, and productionalize these and other innovations into our operation over the next few years. Self-service is another form of efficiency that is a win-win, as customer satisfaction consistently goes up when our customers are able to take control of their travel. In our contact center, we've already piloted initiatives using generative AI and chat functions that are meeting and exceeding our expectations. Mobile applications, kiosks, and online applications continue to gain traction as we increase the available use cases for our customers to transact with ease. In the airport environment, the application of new technology has contributed significantly to baggage handling success, a main driver of customer satisfaction.
This is also an efficiency driver, as mishandled bags are both costly to deal with and consume significant time. Over the next four years, we plan to significantly improve self-service bag drop to 85%, up from the 30% today within our customer base. Another example of using technology to streamline processes that you may have seen last month is how we are expanding biometric boarding across Canada and are the only Canadian airline to do so. Again, early days for this, but we have real traction and will continue to push as we know the potential for customers, for airports, and for airlines is great. Overall, as we look at our efforts in these areas, we know what we are doing is working as 84% of our customers are utilizing online services for their travel at peak periods. This remains a key pillar for future improvements.
And while these initiatives will increase efficiency and productivity, strategically, this also allows us to improve the importance and the quality of the work our people deliver. As technology and other improvements drive efficiencies, our people will be more upskilled and able to take on more complex operational challenges and to provide more personalized service to our customers. We believe this will make their work more safe, more interesting, and ultimately more rewarding. This, in turn, should drive improvements in culture and engagement as we position ourselves to be a global leader in service. In closing, I would like to draw your attention to the key contributions our operation will make to our long-term business plan. First, our operational performance will continue to improve on the 17 points we have gained in A14 since 2022, with a continuous improvement goal of two additional points in both 2025 and 2026.
By 2028, improved operational performance will drive a range of cost improvements that will contribute 70 basis points in EBITDA margin improvement over and above our labor productivity targets. Second, customer satisfaction will continue to improve on the 10 points we have gained in NPS since 2022, with a substantial 13 points in further improvement targeted by 2028. This will help unlock our right-to-win strategy, drive continued customer loyalty, and allow us to penetrate new markets. And third, in addition to controlling our workforce growth to achieve savings from scale, we will champion ambitious productivity plans that will drive 13 points of improvement by 2028, reaching 20 points by 2030. This will drive a range of cost improvements that will contribute 100 basis points in EBITDA improvement by 2028. These are real and measurable improvements.
I hope I've been able to share with you today why you should have every confidence that we can and will continue to deliver on the strategy and the commitments we are making to improve our operation and the contribution it makes to our business model. Thank you for your time. I will now welcome my colleague, Arielle Meloul-Wechsler, Executive Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer, and Public Affairs to the podium. Thank you.
Thank you, Craig, and good morning, everyone. I'll take a few moments to explain how we train, develop, equip, care for, engage, and empower our people to create a culture of excellence that drives performance. But first, allow me to quickly introduce myself. I began my 27-year career at Air Canada as an M&A lawyer overseeing restructurings and other transactions, such as the IPO of Aeroplan, early in my career. By 2011, when I was offered a growth opportunity in HR, I had come to realize the importance of capitalizing on opportunities in our industry. These transformative years for my career and for our company taught me that our success relies on a high-performance culture. Today, people and culture enable the pillars of Rise Higher, our collective call to action.
We've built that culture over the last 15 years through a deliberate strategy, not through chance, grounded in trust, resiliency, and leadership development. At the same time, we've listened to our employees and understand how important it is for them to be empowered and equipped with the right tools so that they can focus on providing exceptional service to our customers. To facilitate that, we've made investments in our programs that focus on health, wellness, and safety, and that encourage excellence. Today, I'll be speaking about those themes and how they will help us prepare for the future. We all know that trust is very hard to earn and easy to lose. This was especially true when we saw the catastrophic effects of the pandemic. Early on, it became apparent that our industry was being shut down in Canada in a way that, frankly, felt indefinite.
Despite the challenges and uncertainty of this period, we seized the opportunity to complete the overhaul of our passenger service system, to transform and relaunch Aeroplan, and to capitalize on our cargo business. Of course, we still had to make the excruciating but necessary decision to furlough or lay off over 20,000 colleagues, more than half of our workforce, in June of 2020. We knew we had to do this, but we chose to control how we did this. We were as transparent as possible and showed our inactive colleagues the care and class that we extend to our customers. We made a conscious decision to allow our inactive colleagues to maintain access to our employee communications so they could stay informed with real-time updates on what we are doing and why, as well as how we are advocating for our industry and the possibility of their return.
This decision wasn't without risk, but our trust in our colleagues was reciprocated over time, and they understood we would treat them as well as possible. This was the foundation of what came later, once restrictions began to lift in Canada. You see, once restrictions started to be lifted and we began to rebuild our workforce, it became apparent that our decision to keep our furloughed and laid-off colleagues connected to us was the right one. A large number returned. Like many in our ecosystem, however, I won't sugarcoat it, we faced some significant turnover due to retirement and the pursuit of other opportunities, and so began one of the largest recruitment and onboarding efforts in our history. We began in Q3 2021 by recalling more than 10,000 employees who had been laid off.
Between Q3 2021 and the end of 2022, we hired a total of 15,000 new employees. It was both necessary and an opportune time to revisit, frankly, everything, from how we were hiring to onboarding to training. We were not simply trying to return to our pre-pandemic state. We were on a journey to Rise Higher. We onboarded new employees at an unprecedented scale, and many of the colleagues we brought back to work needed refresher training or recertification. As we modified our initial training for these large cohorts, we also updated our annual recurrent training and more specific programs for those looking to upskill or deepen their knowledge. Like all airlines, and in fact, all players in our ecosystem, we faced some growing pains during our rebuild as we found a new rhythm and helped those new in their roles gain experience and proficiency.
This period also dramatically changed the composition of our workforce sharply rather than organically. Today, like many companies, we are now managing four generations in the workplace. These changes give rise to different priorities, wants, and needs. An example of this was our recent pilot negotiations where the needs of different demographic segments within a single bargaining unit had to be met, and we were very pleased that we achieved this responsibly, and now we look forward. We have learned from the challenges we faced and have a renewed sense of determination to serve all our customers with care, class, and excellence through ECX, which you just heard about from Craig. I mentioned how important listening is in our culture earlier, and listening has been and will continue to be a key component of the ECX program and the continued evolution of our culture.
The success of ECX relies on the empowerment of all our employees. We're empowering and trusting our people managers to do the right thing, and in turn, asking them to do the same, empowering and trusting their team members to do the right thing. We're also focused on ensuring that employees at every level feel seen, recognized, and valued so that they bring their best to work every day and, like all of us, remain focused on continuous improvement. This depends on the strength of our leadership team and its ability to build the trust it takes to drive high performance so that we can execute against our goals and deliver on our commitments to employees, customers, and shareholders. Our goal is to develop a strong pool of future leaders, and to do this, we've invested heavily in leadership development at Air Canada. We've defined Air Canada's leadership commitments.
We inspire our people, we enable performance, we find solutions. These leadership traits are at the core of a new 18-month development program for all people managers called Elevate, which was designed with feedback from employee-focused groups and will equip managers to better support our frontline colleagues. Elevate focuses heavily on empathy, building trust, and empowering our people by leading with care and class every day, all critical to the success of our ECX program. It comprises three modules, and to date, more than 2,000 people leaders have completed the first module, and our training teams are busy rolling out the second module. Those leadership traits are also being reinforced throughout all talent programs and processes, taking a consistent approach to hiring, developing, and promoting leaders at all levels. We are strengthening a deep, resilient leadership bench, building on resiliency within our workforce.
We encourage cross-functional development and movement, and more than 80% of our senior leaders are homegrown and have been with the organization for more than five years. Just as my own role has changed and grown over time, many of our senior leaders started out in different roles at Air Canada, including, as you just heard from Craig, in some cases in frontline roles. At the same time, we also recognize the importance of gaining different perspectives and expertise through welcoming external talent. In addition to John, who you all know, over the last couple of years, we've also made some key external hires and promotions across financial strategy, internal audit, ethics, airport operations, data and digital, and loyalty to name but a few. As we consider our promotions and hires, we keep a keen eye on reflecting all dimensions of diversity.
We know it's the right thing to do and ensure we have the broadest pool of talent. All our programs and policies are informed by what we know about our employees based on what they have directly or indirectly shared with us. We're always listening to our employees through many channels, from formal surveys to focus groups to more informal conversations to management presence in the operation to feedback we receive by emails or in questions at town halls or during quarterly webcasts. This may sound rather basic, but in a global company such as ours, where the vast majority of our employees are not working office jobs, we have to be intentional and make it a priority to remain connected to the pulse of our employees, and we take their feedback to heart.
We need a healthy and resilient workforce to sustain high performance, and we continue to invest in health, safety, and wellness programs. We recently won the Mental Health Gold certification from Excellence Canada for our wellness programs. While we don't offer the breadth of programs we do to our employees as part of a strategy to win awards, as you can see on screen, we've received significant recognition for our programs, resulting in a strong culture. Without a doubt, recognition in this form further builds our employer brand and instills pride among our employees, helping with both our attraction and retention efforts. On the latter, I believe that it's no coincidence that our voluntary turnover number for 2023 at 6.67% is significantly lower than the 2023 transportation industry average of 9.2%.
Our numbers for 2024 are trending even lower, with a year-to-date voluntary turnover rate of 4.46% at the end of October. Finally, we recognize excellence and high performance. Our flagship recognition program is our Excellence Awards, which celebrate employees at all levels who make significant contributions and are role models for their colleagues. Earlier this year, we showcased the 2023 cohort of recipients on the tail of one of our aircraft. This month, we're beginning the process of surprising the 35th edition of Excellence Award recipients, a cohort of 62 who will join the more than 1,500 employees who have received this award since its inception in 1981. In summary, our culture's strength and resiliency drive our success, and nurturing it remains our priority.
We're committed to making Air Canada a place where all our colleagues can build a career, thrive, and be proud of the work that we're doing together and what our brand represents. The key actions and objectives discussed today are embedded in our performance incentive plans, supporting our collective efforts and investments in people for sustainable growth. This will ensure that we deliver the best of Canada to the world today and into the future. I will now welcome back Michael Rousseau to the stage.
Well, great, thank you, Arielle. Listen, today we showcased our robust investment thesis, our solid financial targets, and our unwavering commitment to deliver solid shareholder value. So let's recap today's discussion. Our ambition is to expand our global footprint. We are the leading premium carrier in Canada and continue to assert ourselves as a global champion.
By 2030, we aim to be above CAD 30 billion in revenues, with an adjusted EBITDA margin between 18% and 20%. We will maintain a disciplined approach to capital investments, keeping them under 12% of revenues. We expect to generate structural free cash flow and bring down our diluted share count to under 300 million. We are resolute in our conviction to reaching our long-term ambitions. Our unwavering focus on free cash flow generation and the robust strength of our balance sheet will enable significant shareholder value creation. Our track record proves that we are and will continue to be exceptional capital allocators. Our strategic initiatives are designed to foster sustainable growth, fortify our unique advantages, and leverage our opportunities. With our team's commitment to execution, Air Canada is well positioned to achieve its ambitious goals and become a world-class leader.
Our commitment to excellence and innovation is stronger than ever, and we are confident that the future holds tremendous potential for all our stakeholders. Thank you for your continued trust in and support for Air Canada's management team, our vision, and our strategic direction. We will now pause for a short video while we set up for a Q&A. Thank you very much for your time and attention.
We do a lot of things that the regular public don't know about. Dreams Take Flight is you never hear about that in the news. We've been doing that for 40 years, 30, 40 years. And that's a huge piece of Air Canada. That's the core of it, the way we think. I think it's our ability to be agile.
So I think when I first started in 2009, there was the financial crisis in the world was going on, and everything that we did was cost-cutting. So I feel like we've been able to do the cost-cutting, rein everything in. It got really good for a while, and by 2019, we were flying like crazy, and then COVID hit, but we were prepared. So I feel like we were able to scale it back right away and go into something. So I think it's our greatest achievement is being able to be agile and kind of flex with how the world was going.
Right up until COVID, that amount of time and what the company was able to produce in that time and the improvements that they made and the growth that they had, I think was one of their biggest achievements that I saw in my 24 years here. I think sometimes we lose the fact that we were flying massive machines in the air. Something magical about that where you transport people safely from point A to point B, and you're part of the team that makes that magic happen. Big network, so people and my customers, they have a lot of opportunity to move their cargo or move their passenger from point A to point B. So I believe Air Canada has proven within these years that we are the true national airline, and we are proud of our airline.
During the early days, 2000, 2001, when Air Canada and Canadian Airlines merged, so it was bringing together two different cultures. I would say that we're very nimble, and we're able to realize when something may be not going as planned, and we're able to adapt and make a change. We've been in business for 80+ years, 85 years almost and more, and I'm hoping that this company stays forever because the people that work for Air Canada and the benefits we have, it's very impressive, very impressive. So at the end of the day, I want Air Canada to do well, and the people become family. The people that you work with are not just your colleagues, they're just not coworkers, they become family.
Okay, we're now ready for Q&A, and please join me in welcoming our executive management to the stage.
As usual, we would ask that you please restrict yourself to one question only in the interest of time. We do have lunch coming just after this, so we will do one question each, and we will also take. We do have some questions from the virtual attendees as well that I will be reading out loud. So maybe I will ask if there's a question in the room. Yes, Andrew? And if you can please introduce yourself, Jamie, that's fine. We'll do Andrew after.
I was going to claim to be Andrew.
So if you don't mind, please, if you could please introduce yourself to the audience before asking your question, please. Thank you.
Jamie Baker with JPMorgan. So John, could you give us a little bit more clarity on sale-leasebacks? There are cases where airlines engage in that.
Sometimes that inflated prices, and then they make it up to the lessor over time. Sometimes the premiums are taken as an offset to costs. There are a couple of airlines in India that book it as revenue in the top line, which just seems weird to me. Just, I understand what you're doing with the fleet in terms of targeting a new owned versus leased metric, but how do we think about the mechanics of those transactions and how they manifest in your financials? Thanks.
Yeah, thank you. So a couple of things. One is that we're not looking to manage any kind of P&L effects or these things. It's really simply just a very, I think, responsible way for us to manage the fleet.
We did want to have our own ability to book those slots, and typically lead times have been extended, and making sure we had clarity as to where and when the lift would come was important. As we get closer in, it's simply a fact of taking advantage of a strong balance sheet. Frankly, some of the aircraft we have coming are phenomenal aircraft that have very good value. And I think we do relatively well on procurement as well. So I think that those are all things that just put us in a very solid position to take some of the fleet as it comes. And I won't use the word because these things are always complex, but seemingly plain vanilla type of leasing structures that would give us the opportunity to reduce some of the cash flow burden.
The mechanics of it are that those sales- lease backs are effectively offsetting CapEx. So there's a burden of CapEx coming, and as we estimate about CAD 3 billion of that will be absorbed by the sales- lease back structure. We think about it pretty intensely across the leverage side and on the debt side. So this is also made within a framework that puts our balance sheet in the right spot and at the same time puts the right mix in the fleet. Yeah, thank you.
Andrew, please.
Hi, Andrew Didora at Bank of America. Maybe John, within your plan today when you talk about, sorry, some mid-single digit ASM growth over the next, call it four years, how are you thinking about competitive capacity growth in that environment? How are you thinking about overall industry growth?
And then what are maybe two to three drivers that you think will allow you to get to that kind of 2%-3% RASM growth with that much growth? Thank you.
I'll start it off, and I think Mark probably would want to add some color here, but I think it's important to think about our capacity growth plan as I put it out on the chart and try to kind of really just simplify it, which is there's a good chunk of that that's coming just coming back from GDP, moderate GDP, and just some capacity recovery. So if you take that 5%-6%, you got over 3% that is, we think for us, very attainable just running the airline the way we run it. Above and beyond that, I'd say the two drivers are going to be that growth in international destinations, and we've seen it.
I mean, these are in our numbers over the last several years. We're just putting the capacity to work here, and these are 10%+ growth traffic markets on fast-growing routes, which effectively we're growing into growing markets as opposed to the competitive dynamic of taking share. We'll have our fair share, what we should have on those routes. And then finally, on the U.S. Sixth Freedom side, it's really. I mean, we have over 30 A220s, we'll have over 60 A220s. We offer a really compelling product to U.S. markets for particularly niche markets, and it's really some simple math. If you take 1% of U.S. population, 350 million people, that's 3.5 million people. Canadian population, just about 40. The addressable market expansion is a multiple by just addressing some of those niche markets with product we have.
So when we look at the ability to take that capacity into market and kind of have a balanced yield environment, it's really about growing with growing markets, and it's growing in places where we have a compelling competitive advantage in terms of the product we offer. And I think in both those cases, we've been relatively reasonable with the assumption of 7%-8% revenue comes off of 5%-6% capacity, which leaves you two points of annual RASM. We live between 84% and 86% load fairly nicely. That's a sweet spot for where we operate. We're not moving that around too much. And CPI in the same plan is estimated at 2%-2.25%. So I think by and large, we have good mechanics there to kind of balance that equation.
Yeah, sure.
So in our modeling going forward, we've assumed that competition grows at the same rhythm that we grow. We're not assuming any material gains in market share or market position that we have today. On the revenue drivers, we talked a lot about our revenue management strategy. We think that we've got levers. We call it manufacturing of yield. We think the premium demand tailwind is with us, and we're going to add a lot of premium demand as capacity, as Mark and I have illustrated, and as well. And we're starting to see this in Q4 this year. We think corporate has a bigger rebound to go. So you put that all together, that drives kind of that RASM growth over the cycle.
Just before we take the next question, I'll read one from our virtual audience. It's actually from Tom Fitzgerald at TD Cowen.
And perhaps this is for you, Craig and John. How is the team thinking about the risk that maintenance benefits of new technology aircraft are not realized due to some of the teething problems we have seen thus far? It seems like this could be offset some of the fuel efficiency gains.
Sure. Thanks, Tom, for the question. Listen, one of the things we're most excited about in the corporate plan is the introduction of these new aircraft. They bring tremendous benefits both from a fuel efficiency due to the new technology associated with the engines that will be on board the aircraft, as well as increased reliability. New aircraft tend to perform more reliably from a dispatch perspective than obviously older aircraft. So lots of reason to be enthusiastic. The question, I guess, is could there be some teething problems that could offset that?
I have to conclude the question might be related a bit to some of the challenges we have with our A220 fleet, specifically the Pratt & Whitney engine on that aircraft, the PW1500. This is an engine, and it's a very well-known issue in the marketplace that Pratt & Whitney has had. And indeed, with these new aircraft coming in, we have seen some of these aircraft unable to operate the schedule that we otherwise would have planned for them. The good news is we're working very closely with Pratt & Whitney, and we're turning a corner, and we're starting to see improvements in the general trends that we've been monitoring. And we believe by the end of 2025, we will have fully resolved the issues, and we'll see a full utilization of that fleet.
The A321XLRs that are coming in, which are also Pratt engine powered, do not have the same specific issue, the powder metal issue, for example, that was present on the A220 fleet, so we don't see that issue coming forward. Neither do we have any concerns about the 787-10, so no particular areas of concern, and I believe we will significantly and materially harness the benefits we're anticipating.
You're on, Konark.
Okay, thanks. It's Konark Gupta from Scotiabank. Thanks for the presentation this morning. Just wanted to understand perhaps from the team, like you talked about revenue growth over the long term across the system, and the traffic and capacity is kind of less than that revenue growth, so it sounds like obviously you're embedding some sort of RASM optimism in there, but the margin is also expanding.
So it also seems like there's some CASM inflation in the system, but it's not perhaps as much as the RASM growth that you're expecting. So can you lay down some sort of guideposts around the CASM or just CASM beyond 2025 as you see those productivity initiatives come through? Thanks.
Sure. Thanks, Konark.
Thanks for the question. So I think you'll find the chart, and I know that you've seen it, but just maybe spend some time with it again on the EBITDA growth. It gives you a good sense for the expansion. I would tell you that in simple terms, RASM up about 2% in the plan, call it just basic CPI, cost inflation probably up around the same level. So cost and RASM kind of cancel themselves out. The margin expansion really comes from those critical levers we talked about.
We have about CAD 1 billion of margin expansion that's coming from modern fleet, really the scale effect and productivity. And so I think that Mark has mentioned it here as well. We have a good revenue manufacturing machine that I think will protect the RASM. From a CASM on a unit cost basis, I would say that you'll see the biggest pressure here in 2025 on a relative basis, and it kind of comes up in our guide for the year. And that number, 14.25%-14.5%, takes the brunt of that late cycle inflationary impact. Agreements with airports, there's a fairly big investment cycle coming for airports as well. That'll translate back into cost. We are going to feel the full effects of our two largest labor agreements here with the pilot agreement, but also the flight attendants in 2025. So I think those will drive pressure.
As you look beyond 2025, again, without kind of overprescribing annual unit guidance, we'll look at those as they come. But I would tell you that there's two real kind of pieces that move there. Think about a CPI growth of actual cost, but what it masks is it masks cost reduction. And I'll give you a little bit of a piece of why. Within our CASM unit cost, you have depreciation. And I tried to bring it up here in some of the material I showed you. Depreciation will converge to the higher level. We run at about $1.8 billion a year today. We are going to converge probably up $1 billion or so from where we are by the time we get to 2028. That's going to put an annual 1% pressure on unit CASM. Good news, it's non-cash.
And the good news is that we have fully kind of articulated that within our leverage and our cash and cash allocation plan. So I would tell you that beyond 2025, you're really getting some depreciation push with, let's call it a CPI minus 100 basis points cost growth.
We'll go to you, Fadi. And then after that, I'll read a question from our virtual audience from Stephen Trent.
Okay, thank you. Fadi Chamoun from BMO. Maybe Mark, if when you think about this kind of growth plan for the next four years, is there a way to characterize how much is capacity going into new routes or new areas that you're going to be kind of covering versus just adding capacity to the network right now?
On the CapEx side, that 12% that we get to in the end, is that just maintenance CapEx or does that assume some gross CapEx in it?
I'll handle the second one.
Yeah, so about new routes is roughly about 25% of how we're going to allocate the new capacity. And then 75% of it is actually increasing either a gauge on current routes where you have an RJ that's going to go to a 220, for example, or we'll increase the amount of frequency that we have on routes versus 2019. We're still missing a lot of critical frequencies because of some of the fleet and operations constraints that we have today. And building that size and scale is going to support our international network. So that's the way we look at it, Fadi.
Maybe just on the CapEx.
So we'll give you a pretty good walkthrough on where CapEx is going over the next four or five years. We also give you a little bit of an indicator in terms of post 2028. I think in this environment, you always need to be studying the fleet five years in advance. I mean, it's a reality. And we do have pretty good understanding about what that continued fleet evolution and network plan is. So we continually make assessments on this. You asked whether there was growth. I think these are questions that will evolve. You have options in these orders so that you can add some of that capacity for growth as it comes. We're going to look from a capability point of view. We'll probably look at ultra long range, long haul capacity. Some of the markets we're talking about are longer range routes.
They would benefit potentially from some range capacity so looking into the beginning of the next decade, I think it's going to be decisions we'll make gradually, but also it's going to be a blend of the wide-body portfolio that needs replacement, and that's going to be a specific focus so the 330s and the 777s in the early next decade, and in the middle of the decade, narrow bodies, and we'll manage the portfolio and the purchase rights and options to add growth where and how necessary.
I'll take a question from the virtual audience, and perhaps this is for the Marks, plural. I actually should specify, I mean, Mark Nasr and Mark Galardo, as we also have Marc Barbeau here. In my life at home, the triple M's is March Madness Month. At work, it's Mark, Mark, and Mark.
Regarding your thoughts on revenue growth versus input costs, how should we think about your strategy regarding the amount of revenue that is in U.S. dollars? And what levers can you pull on, Aeroplan or other verticals, to optimize this level? Mark Galardo?
Great question. Very timely. The Canadian dollar under $0.70 this morning. Firstly, on the revenue management side, in one of my slides, I talked about moving from a leg-based system to an origin destination-based system. We can tweak the algorithms in our revenue management system to favor point of sale U.S. And that's exactly what we're doing. In the last two, three years, you probably would have seen our Sixth Freedom numbers have increased significantly. And we're planning on doing more of the same next year. And it's also why we've added so much capacity to the U.S. and new routes.
And I mentioned in some of my prepared remarks and the quarterly remarks that we're doing this for the long term to benefit on point of sale U.S. and increasing our penetration on the U.S. side. So there's a lot more that we can do there. On Aeroplan's side, I'll pass it on to Mark.
For sure. So we talked earlier about how since we've transformed the program, third-party remuneration has about doubled. So that's from Canada, but also internationally. And internationally has far outpaced the growth rates in Canada. When we took over the program, we not only added new partners internationally, but we restructured the agreement. So all of that flow is denominated in USD. And so now we have significantly more USD that comes into the program than leaves the program by virtue of purchasing partner awards and things of that nature.
And going forward, we intend to continue to grow faster internationally, that is the U.S. and other geographies. So that will be an increasing source of USD coming into the program, coming into the company, rather.
Kevin?
Kevin Chiang from CIBC, thanks for the presentation. Maybe if I just look at your CapEx plan, I guess I'm wondering what type of flexibility you might have if your revenue assumptions or if the economic environment doesn't play out the way you anticipated. And maybe just a clarification on the 18%-20% aspirational margin target. Does that fully incorporate the full fleet benefits that you get? Because I think you mentioned some of the fleet gets pushed out past 2028. Or is there upside to that as you bring in some of those -10s much later into the decade? Does that bring that margin potentially above 20%? Thank you.
I'd say the 18%-20% is what we believe is our right range. Of course, things can evolve and give us a little bit of lift beyond that. But I think that we have a roadmap to 17%+ . I think that's kind of fairly clear in how we're going to get there. The fleet will mature. You will get some consolidation and some benefit, including those additional aircraft as they come on. And I think that gets you a push into the 18%-20% range. By and large, I would say that for today, that's probably as precise as we can be. The first part of your question, I'm sorry?
CapEx flexibility of the revenue assumption.
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I showed you a chart, right? We can flex down probably to about 115 billion ASMs from the 130.
If necessary, we could flex up a little bit as well. We continually watch our market, but also our strategic plan in terms of bringing on those aircraft. We have made some tweaks. I mean, part of what you've seen here today is some tweaks in terms of just balancing the ability to take on those aircraft and getting that smooth capacity. We will make adjustments if necessary. And there's always ways to manage some of the capacity. But I would tell you, by and large, we feel like we have the right kind of middle point here, the 130. And we also feel pretty confident in the drivers. And we'll move up and down as necessary with tweaks, as always.
We'll take one last question in the interest of time.
Yeah. Hi, it's Chris Murray from ATB Capital Markets.
Maybe for John, just looking at the stock buyback, just a couple of things about some of the moving parts. Can you talk a little bit about the plan around the converts? You talked about them being anti-dilutive, but they could also convert out at some point. So is it a plan either way? You'll either take the debt to maturity or you'll buy back the additional stock in the market? Is that just to clarify how that looks?
It's not our option. So we can go ahead and we can extinguish the other convertible with cash.
Okay. And then with the free cash flow that you still have, I mean, you're talking about a fairly sizable pool of cash. Really, once you've got your CapEx covered, what's really the other opportunities you have to deploy that free cash flow?
I think we laid it out, right?
There's an opportunity for shareholder returns. It's baked into the plan. It's fairly sizable. We're looking at CAD 2+ billion in this plan. And then we'll continue to observe the market. I mean, over a longer period of time, we could look at other ways of returning cash to shareholders. We're always going to be opportunistic with the right type of M&A, but this would be something that, I mean, we leave ourselves flexibility to make smart and strategic decisions where appropriate. But I would say that by and large, we built a plan that can grow the airline, that can invest in cost reduction, as well as capacity growth. And that gives us the ability to manage the debt. So take down some debt maybe, but also clearly return cash to shareholders in the short term on share buybacks and longer term, we'll see.
Okay.
I'm aware you have many more questions. And at this point, I'll invite our executives to step off the stage. I'll invite you to step off the stage. We will be happy to take your questions over lunch. We're pleased to offer you lunch today. And our executive members will be around to answer any questions you may have. And as usual, as you can do, if you have any further questions, you can address them to investor relations. And we will be pleased to respond to you. So thank you very, very much for joining us today. So please join us for a lunch. And also with our executive members, we'll be senior leaders of the team that will be delighted to meet you today. So please take the time to interact with the team.
And a reminder that in this time of giving, remember that we have made a donation to a charity of your choice. There are three to pick from. So on your way out, if you could please make your selection to donate to one of the three deserving charities we've preselected today. And from all of us at Air Canada, we will wish you a very wonderful holiday season. And perhaps maybe one more forward-looking statement. I will wish you a healthy, happy, and high-yielding New Year. And for all of the magicians that have made today happen, from the Air Canada team to the Lumi team and the Encore team, a huge thank you, a huge thank you. And just in the spirit of a little more magic coming your way, I'll direct you to one last video. And then we will break for lunch. Thank you very much.