Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q2 2021 Allegiant Travel Company Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Sherry Wilson. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Sati. Welcome to the Allegiant Travel Company Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. On the call with me today are Maury Gallagher, the company's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, John Redmond, the company's President, Greg Anderson, our EVP and Chief Financial Officer, Scott Sheldon, our EVP and Chief Operating Officer, Scott DeAngelo, our EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Drew Wells, our SVP of Revenue and Planning, and a handful of others to help answer questions. We will start the call with commentary and then open it up to questions. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. The company's comments today will contain forward-looking statements concerning our future performance and strategic plans. Various risk factors could cause the underlying assumptions of these statements and our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by our forward-looking statements.
These risk factors and others are more fully disclosed in our filings with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements are based on information available to us today. We undertake no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of future events, new information, or otherwise. The company cautions investors not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which may be based on assumptions and events that do not materialize. To view this earnings release, as well as the rebroadcast of the call, visit the company's investor relations site at ir.allegiantair.com. With that, I'll turn it over to Maury.
Thank you, Sherry. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us again this quarter. We had an excellent Q2 quarter, as our numbers showed. While we averaged only a 65% load factor in April and May on average, June's 77% brought the quarter average up to 70%. As is usually the case, June dominated the quarter with over 40% of our passengers and departures in that one month. These highlights from June and the quarter provide the backdrop for our comments today and our cautious optimism for the remainder of this year and on into 2022. We peak our operations every summer for approximately 75 days, from Memorial Day through mid-August. In this particular quarter, we grew capacity 3.3%, while June was up 12.6%. This is again against 2019. This peaking also applies to the major support partners critical to our operations.
The often-repeated shortage of personnel in the past 60 days was a critical problem for our operational partners, including TSA, our airport contractors, fuel suppliers, and others, which have resulted in less than a stellar operation. I mean, it's been two years, I might add, since we and the industry have had to operate at peak capacity given we took off last summer. This operational rust, as I like to call it, has been a challenge for all aspects of our industry. In spite of these speed bumps, however, demand is back. June results were proof of this fact. We continue to lead the industry out of this COVID black hole. The trend is there, and we are moving back to our historic industry-leading profit profile.
The leisure sector has been extremely strong, and it's been a bit of the Wild West as the industry has focused its post-COVID operations almost exclusively on leisure, given the problems with business and international traffic. This additional leisure focus by others in our industry has not affected our competitive footprint. We are still maintaining our 2019 profile of approximately 75% non-competitive. We finished our Airbus transition in late 2018, and while we had fewer aircraft in 2019 compared to that 2018, our 2019 performance was exceptional. We increased our operating margin to an industry-leading 20%, which was a 36% increase compared to 2018. Our model at the end of 2019 was firing on all cylinders as we headed into early 2020, early last year. We were continuing our growth and our outsized results in both January and February. ASMs during those first two months were up 16%.
This is all before the onset of COVID. Today, in July 2021, it is my strong belief we are now positioned to continue where we left off in early 2020. We are bullish on our model and its ability to continue to perform. Our near-term results suggest a good outcome for 2022. Currently, we are planning above-average growth. Moreover to that end, we have acquired all the aircraft we believe we will need for 2022, save a single airplane. Greg will have additional thoughts on these comments, on these ideas. Another promising development has been our ancillary and third-party revenue efforts. We have discussed previously our focus on generating additional revenues from our customers. We want to leverage our direct one-on-one relationship we have with them. We have introduced our ancillary bundling offering early last year, just as COVID was beginning. Fast-forward to today, and the hoped-for benefits are being realized.
Drew will have a few more comments on this particular issue. Regarding third-party revenues, we have seen excellent results from the company's credit card efforts as well as a strong uptick in our rental car contribution. You may recall our relationship with Enterprise is one of the strongest rental car partnerships in the leisure space. The recent shortage of rental cars has benefited us on a pricing front. Another part of our optimistic belief is Sunseeker is located in the very middle of perhaps the best leisure vacation area in the country, Southwest Florida, within easy driving distance of three of our top-performing markets, PIE, Punta Gorda, and Sarasota. Historically, we have carried over 4 million people per year in and out of these terrific destinations. As I mentioned, in early 2020, we were well on our way to growing our model, including building out Sunseeker.
We are back in the same position today as we were in that early part of 2020. Given this thought process and belief, we will be restarting and completing the construction of Sunseeker and continuing what we termed our Allegiant 2.0 plan. Sunseeker will contribute nicely to this strategy. The board unanimously agreed with our recommendation to finish the resort. John will have further comments about our plans and the associated financing. Lastly, we have seen a dramatic increase in our cash balances. In early May, we completed a $335 million secondary offering. These funds, combined with our aggressive cash management during the last year, plus the benefits from PSP and tax refunds, has improved our cash balances to $1.2 billion, up 79% from a year ago.
This threefold increase in liquidity has dramatically improved our balance sheet and positioned us for the growth we've been talking about in not only next year, but the years thereafter. Lastly, our team members continue to be the backbone of our company, particularly in this difficult COVID-dominated period of the past year. They have been there during these difficult days, taking care of our passengers and getting them safely to their destinations. John?
Thank you very much, Maury. Good afternoon, everyone. First and foremost, I want to take this opportunity to thank our incredible team members we have who make it all happen and put us in this enviable position of producing these incredible results. As Maurice stated, we have made the decision to restart and finish construction of Sunseeker Resort. You may recall on May 12, 2020, during a Q1 earnings call, I made the comment we would suspend construction for 18 months until we had greater clarity on business impacts from the pandemic and ensuring we had a better, stronger balance sheet. 14 months since I made the comment and 17 months since we stopped, we have that stronger balance sheet I referenced. Significantly stronger, I might add.
We recently signed a non-binding term sheet to borrow $350 million with the resort as collateral and Allegiant guarantee, a structure that gives us the best flexibility and cost. We expect to have final loan docs completed within the next 30-45 days. For some additional Sunseeker data points. We will announce the start date and opening timeframe at a press conference to be held at the resort site in Charlotte Harbor, Florida, on August 3rd. Our media relations team will announce details to the press as we get closer to that date. This will be the only opportunity for members of the media to access the site, since it will be an active construction zone. We will host an investor call on August 5th to discuss all things Sunseeker. The format will be similar to an earnings call, with management presentations followed by a Q&A.
We intend to leave enough time to answer all questions. Because we will provide this dedicated opportunity, we will not be taking any questions regarding Sunseeker during today's earnings call. Please save your questions for the investor call next week. For any analysts interested in taking a site tour, I will be available and happy to host you between August 9th through August 11th. Please contact Sherry Wilson to make the necessary arrangements. Similar to my comment about the press, this will be a unique opportunity to tour the site before it becomes an active construction zone. Once construction is underway, we will no longer be able to host tours until the property is ready for its public opening. We will discuss the golf course renovation start date and opening timeframe as well at the August 3rd press conference. These are our only comments today regarding Sunseeker.
Stay tuned for August 3rd and 5th next week. As I've done in past earnings calls, I thought it would be helpful to provide some directional data points to help you understand how we see things for full year 2021. All the data points I am providing are on a GAAP basis, with fuel assumed at $2.03 a gallon for the full year. EBITDA inclusive of PSP should exceed $525 million, with a margin around 30%. Fully diluted EPS in excess of $13 a share. Year-end cash balance around $1.3 billion, assuming receipt of $136 million NOL. This does not include any proceeds from any financing related to Sunseeker. Year-end net debt around $300 million, again, assuming receipt of the $136 million NOL. Again, this does not include any proceeds from the Sunseeker-related financing.
As a point of clarification, the capital expenditure guidance provided in the release is airline only and does not include any estimates for Sunseeker. Again, in that investor day on the 5th, we will talk all things Sunseeker, and you will get incredible amount of data and detail with full transparency on everything. With that note, Greg will provide more detail around the data points I just provided in his commentary. With that, I'll turn it over to Scott DeAngelo.
Thanks, John. From a marketing perspective this past quarter, we saw the strong return of domestic leisure travel demand.
We laid a foundation with major initiatives that we expect to drive continued strength throughout the remainder of this year, into next year, and beyond. Visits to allegiant.com were up by 5% this past quarter versus 2019, while transactions were up by 10% in the same time period. The fact that transactions increased at double the rate of web visits points to Allegiant's heightened brand awareness, increased marketing efficacy, and enhanced web and app experience, all of which combine to attract and convert more new and more returning customers in the lowest cost ways. Nearly 80% of visits to allegiant.com came without any incremental variable advertising costs because the visitor came to us by directly entering the allegiant.com URL, by clicking links in marketing emails, or by clicking organic search engine links. We also saw deeper levels of customer engagement across all we offer at allegiant.com.
Overall, third-party revenue, which comprises co-brand credit card, hotel stays, and car rentals, was up by 26%, despite 11% fewer passengers in the quarter versus 2019. Most notably, our Allegiant World Mastercard saw its number one and number three best months of new cardholder acquisition in the program's history during this past June and May, respectively. Total new card sign-ups for the quarter were up by more than 20%, and total co-brand compensation for the quarter was up by more than 35% versus 2019. This is an especially promising foundation upon which to introduce our new non-credit card-based loyalty program, Allways Rewards, which is set to launch in Q3. As some may recall from our 2019 Investor Day, Allways Rewards will be Allegiant's first-ever loyalty program in the traditional non-credit card sense. There's really nothing traditional about it.
Allways Rewards, named for all the ways Allegiant serves leisure travel customers and all the ways those customers can benefit from this program, was not designed by following the footsteps of traditional frequent flyer miles-based programs that feature high touch benefits that are appropriate for business or international travelers, but are often not attainable for less frequent domestic leisure travelers and whose complexity and cost would detract from the ULCC model. Rather, Allways Rewards builds off the success of our credit card's simple point earning and point redemption model, and also draws inspiration from the most effective programs engaged with by our customers in all aspects of their life. That includes Apple Card, Amazon Prime, and Target Circle Rewards, just to name a few.
We patterned Allways Rewards to be a tech-forward program that maximizes our customers' ability to earn and redeem points in any amount, at any time, for anything we sell at allegiant.com, all while minimizing operational complexity and cost by making it low touch and digital-centric. Ultimately, while we believe Allways Rewards will be distinctive in its ability to show sustained value to all domestic leisure travelers, we think we're uniquely positioned to appeal to Millennial and Generation Z customers who collectively now represent both the largest and fastest growing age group of Allegiant's customer base. While the primary intent of this program is to promote repeat purchase behavior among our customer base, it is also engineered to stimulate larger transaction sizes by motivating purchases across all the leisure travel products offered at allegiant.com.
The program has also been designed with an eye toward leveraging existing and new strategic partners to create a distinctive program that not only delivers value to current customers, but also enables us to reach new customers and introduce the Allegiant brand via co-marketing through these partner relationships. To that end, earlier this week, we announced an exclusive partnership with select Live Nation venues, Ticketmaster, and music festivals to give customers access to unparalleled live entertainment experiences across the country. The multi-year strategic partnership brings together the best of travel and live experiences, and it includes digital and commerce elements that will enable fans who discover live events and purchase tickets across the Live Nation and Ticketmaster platforms to gain access to turnkey travel packages from Allegiant when planning to attend concerts and festivals across the nation.
Additionally, as customers book travel at allegiant.com, they'll be offered exclusive experiences and events at their destination, national sweepstakes opportunities, and more. Ultimately, we expect this partnership to help us accelerate new customer acquisition and email database growth dramatically, enhance our leisure travel offerings with top live entertainment in key cities, help quickly elevate Allways Rewards into a leading leisure program, and help pave the path for winning over more Generation X, Millennial, and Generation Z consumers to the Allegiant brand.
Our goal with this partnership, along with Allegiant Stadium and all our major leisure product partnerships, is to strategically weave Allegiant into the fabric of the most important aspects of leisure travel in a continued asset-light fashion that enables us to strengthen our core airline businesses' existing network and focus city destinations, as well as our high margin third-party revenue streams through both direct media and physical engagements that attract new customers and inspire incremental larger transactions from existing ones. With that, I'll pass it over to Drew Wells.
Thank you, Scott, and thanks everyone for joining us this afternoon. Revenue momentum continued into the second quarter, with total revenues down just 3.9% versus the second quarter of 2019 on scheduled service ASM growth of +4.5%. Essentially, all of this growth came during the peak of Memorial Day through the end of June. Included in that number is incremental breakage associated with credit vouchers amounting to roughly 5% of the quarter's revenue. A huge part of this growth is the increase in our total ancillary revenue by 2%, despite carrying 11% fewer passengers in the quarter. As Maury mentioned, our bundled air ancillary program launched in fourth quarter 2019, and while ancillary more than held its own through the pandemic, the recovery is helping to showcase the significant value the program, aided by website redesign, can deliver.
As we continue to test product mix and pricing, as well as further develop the program to appeal to a broader subset of itineraries, bundles will continue to produce value. The RM team has done a phenomenal job alongside EHI and Scott DeAngelo's team managing a unique rental car market. Despite a sizable reduction in inventory available and in turn, car days sold, we recorded the highest net revenue figure in company history. These, along with the co-brand wins from Scott , are a fantastic story and made even better by passenger trends continuing to improve as well. Loads have improved sequentially in each of the last five months and will do so again in July as we will cross the 80% mark.
All of the above sequential improvements led to total revenue in the month of June 2021 surpassing June 2019 total revenue, despite headwinds from fixed fee and other revenue. I expect the third quarter will replicate this, and we are guiding 3Q total operating revenues to be +3.5% to +7.5% versus the third quarter 2019. We will accomplish this on scheduled service ASM growth between +16% and +20% versus 3Q 2019. As opposed to the second quarter's cadence, however, this growth percentage is relatively level across each month. We are built to follow seasonal demand trends of the leisure customer, and this year is no different as we anticipate September flying to be about 50% of July ASMs. While still early, demand trends look fine for the off-peak, and I am pleased with how capacity and demand are aligning there.
A sizable part of the growth through the back half of the year will come on new routes. From year-round service to hyper seasonal one-weekend route adds, we will have over 100 new markets begin service between April 1 and December 31st of this year. Among those routes are service to four new cities announced in the second quarter: Minneapolis, Amarillo, Washington Dulles, and Melbourne, Florida, in addition to complementary Phoenix service at Sky Harbor. For context, roughly 13% of third and fourth quarter ASMs will come from routes in their first 12 months. This is about on par with the distribution during our network investment and the groundwork laid in 2015 and 2016. We are not the only carrier interested in pursuing new leisure opportunities. However, as Maury Gallagher mentioned, our current competitive overlap outlook is virtually identical to our 2019 position.
With that, I'd like to pass it over to Greg.
Thank you, Drew. Good afternoon, everyone. Before I begin, I too want to echo others' comments and thank our team members for their incredible commitment, drive, and hard work over the past quarter as we continue to ramp up. Looking at the current tone of our business, for the second quarter, we reported GAAP net income of $95 million, or $5.49 in earnings per share. Adjusted net income, excluding the impact of PSP, was just under $60 million or $3.46 per share of nearly $7 per share from the previous quarter. This increase in EPS is with the added headwind of the incremental shares issued with the common stock offering during the quarter. For the remainder of my prepared remarks, I will plan to reference adjusted numbers only, which excludes the impact from PSP.
Second quarter's substantial margin improvement was fueled by June's performance as its total revenue was the highest monthly revenue in our company's history. This does include a tailwind resulting from recognition of incremental voucher breakage revenue, as Drew just mentioned. Early in the pandemic, we extended the expiry of our vouchers to 24 months. As such, we appropriately adjusted our estimated breakage rates in order to monitor for variability in customer redemption patterns. As we continue to observe sustained trends that reflect no meaningful changes to these redemption patterns, we've updated our estimates accordingly, which has also been incorporated in our forward revenue outlook. Even excluding this breakage tailwind, June was still a top-three all-time revenue month.
Turning to costs, when comparing 2Q results with the previous quarter, our adjusted non-fuel costs increased sequentially by only 5%, which is well below our sequential ASM growth of 15%. Our reported adjusted unit costs, excluding fuel, came in at $0.0586 for the second quarter, down 1% year-over-year and in line with expectations. Moving to liquidity, adjusted EBITDA came in at $138 million, just shy of our average per quarter during 2019, yet further strengthening our conviction of getting back to $6 million in annual EBITDA per aircraft. The hefty cash generation during the quarter was aided by forward-booking strength, as evidenced by the increase in our total ATL to $440 million, an increase of 8% sequentially.
We reinvested $46 million back into the business during the quarter in the form of airline CapEx, which includes $28 million for the purchase of two aircraft, $9 million for a spare engine, and the remaining for kits and parts for future aircraft. Adjusted free cash flow generation of $100 million during the quarter aided our total ending balance of $1.2 billion and $400 million in net debt. These balances exclude the $136 million of incremental cash we expect to receive in the coming months in the form of our NOL refund. Our already strong liquidity position was greatly enhanced by the equity raise in May, which resulted in $335 million in incremental cash through the issuance of 1.6 million shares. This opportunistic equity raise was very well timed to balance growth capital for the airline while also limiting dilution.
Our fortress balance sheet will serve us extremely well as we continue to grow the airline and take advantage of the numerous aircraft opportunities we see in front of us. Turning to our second half of 2021 outlook. Based on current trends, we expect the back half of 2021 capacity to be up around 18% year-over-two. Using such capacity assumptions, adjusted unit costs excluding fuel should come in around $0.063 for the back half of the year, which is 6% less than the same period in 2019. Since our last earnings call, these estimates reflect incremental costs of around $10 million per quarter, primarily spread over areas such as stations, labor, and sales and marketing. Addressing these essential areas help us stay a step ahead.
For stations, a major driver are strategic wage increases our third-party service providers need in order to remain competitive in light of staffing challenges. I might add, this isn't unique to Allegiant, as all carriers in other industries seem to be experiencing staffing challenges. For labor, we are hiring additional operational heads to ensure we are prepared to support not only our stated growth targets but also future longer-term opportunities. For sales, we are seeing an uptick in total credit card processing fees. That's primarily due to the higher than expected bookings, which I also might add is a high-quality problem to have. Finally, for marketing, we are planning for some additional strategic marketing spend, which we believe will be accretive to the bottom line.
Even with these incremental costs I just outlined, we still expect our full year 2021 CASM- ex to be around $0.062, nearly 5% below 2019 levels on a capacity increase of roughly 10% year over two. Combining our second half 2021 cost expectations with our 3Q revenue guide and current booking trends, we expect adjusted full year EPS to be more than $5 per share. This assumes fuel at $2.11 per gallon for the back half of 2021 or $2.03 for the full year, as John mentioned earlier. This also takes into account the incremental share count as a result of our equity offering. Getting back to sustained earnings enhances our flexibility around minimum cash levels and deploying excess capital. Our top priority with such excess capital is to reinvest back in the airline, followed by deleveraging.
We expect our total full year 2021 airline CapEx to be $220 million. Additionally, based on current debt maturity profiles, we expect our ending 2021 balance of gross debt to be $1.5 billion. Turning to fleet. During the second quarter, we placed into service three aircraft, bringing our total in-service aircraft at June's end to 103, and expect to have 108 aircraft in service by year's end. Since the onset of the pandemic, our fleet team has now signed up 24 A320 series aircraft, 21 of them since the beginning of this year, all at an average price discounted by 30% when compared to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, I'm excited to announce that just this week we finalized a deal with Air Lease for the acquisition of 10 A320 series aircraft under a finance lease. All these aircraft are expected to enter service in 2022.
A press release followed by an 8-K will be forthcoming. These deliveries largely round out all the aircraft needed for next year, and our plan includes 19 incremental aircraft to be placed into service throughout 2022, bringing our total expected fleet count by the end of next year to 127 aircraft. Our fleet strategy gives us enormous flexibility in the coming months and years as we have the optionality to pace our growth to not only match demand, but also ensure it is in lockstep with our operational support. We will be finalizing our 2022 budget this quarter and expect to provide its outlook during our October earnings call.
Lastly, on fleet, all the aircraft we have signed up since the onset of the pandemic will be inducted into service at 186 seats, bringing our estimated total of 186-seat aircraft ending in 2022 to 71, which equates to roughly 55% of our total fleet. By way of comparison, the 186-seat aircraft only made up 26% of our total fleet back in 2019. The higher gauge 186 seat produces more EBITDA per aircraft than our other two configurations of 156 and 177 seats. In closing with Sunseeker, and as John noted, we have a non-binding term sheet under our Sunseeker subsidiary to borrow capital to complete the construction of our resort. I wanted to reframe that this debt is secured only by the assets under our Sunseeker subsidiary with a guarantee from Allegiant.
We believe the materially lower interest rate enhanced flexibility in larger advanced amounts by having a corporate guarantee outweigh the benefit of a non-recourse structure. With this debt financing, this project is expected to be fully funded with no additional equity capital from Allegiant. We are excited about restarting the project along with the increased optionality its completion brings and look forward to providing further detail on August 5th. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for questions.
As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. We ask each caller to please limit your questions to one and one follow-up only. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. For the first question, we have Joseph DeNardi from Stifel. Joseph, your line is open.
Oh, thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. I'll let someone else ask about Sunseeker and respect your wishes. Drew, I think the plan is to end 2022, you said at 127 aircraft. I guess that suggests
The potential for pretty good growth in 2022. Can you just maybe put that into context how you're thinking about ASM growth? Greg, with what seems like good growth next year, can you talk about the cost leverage that you could get off of that essentially? Thank you.
Well, I think, Drew, I think I'll provide a little bit of a disappointing answer. You're right, we have the potential for growth up to that, but we haven't yet set any sort of 2022 targets. We're in the final strokes of planning the spring now, and summer's obviously going to be, I think, a longer stall. There's a wide range of options that are still available for 2022. We're happy with where the ceiling is such that we can reach all that potential. Like Greg said, we're going to be moving in lockstep with the operational groups and making sure that we're growing at the appropriate and measured rate.
Joe, just on the cost front, we'll have a better outlook next quarter after we have our budget finalized. Just in general, high level, I think we have really good control over our costs. The unit cost will depend on the growth that we haven't yet set, but overall, I think we can drive low in the $6.10-$6.30 kind of range for next year 2022 based on capacity growth. Some of the headwinds I think that we might face next year as compared to this year would be labor. Just as I mentioned, we're staffing up operational groups to support growth. Also, this year, we just didn't have as much profit sharing as we normally have. I think that too, next year we expect to be profitable, which will put some pressure or headwind on that. I think some tailwinds, though, will be ownership.
I think we'll get some benefit there as we continue to better utilize our aircraft. We'll have to see with the capacity outlook that we put out, but there could be some tailwind there, along with stations. Some of our station costs that we're seeing, I think there will be some benefit, in particular like airport and landing fees. Right now, there's some pressure there this year, just giving less capacity from an industry perspective, but those, we think, will level out as full industry capacity starts coming back. Stay tuned, we'll have more information, but thought we'd just provide a little high-level there for you.
Okay. Yeah, that's helpful. Drew, I think a couple of quarters ago you said that the network was maybe 10%-15% competitive, and Maury in his remarks said it's 75% non-competitive. Can you just reconcile that? I know there are a million different ways to calculate that, but can you talk about how you're maintaining a similar level of non-competition across the network with what seems to be increased competition?
It really depends on the starting point that you're looking at for your frame of reference here. In the middle of the pandemic, we were down, I believe, as low as 13%. I don't have that number in front of me, but about 13%. We just moved back from that. The amount of capacity that came out has now largely been matched by the amount coming back in to put us back at those 2019 levels. It's really just a timing element there of pandemic and changes to industry networks. In addition to all of the announcements that we've made that have by and large been somewhere in the, I believe, 5%-10% competitive range. We still continue to do our end of this by continuing to diversify away from competition.
Thank you.
For the next question, we have Catie O'Brien from Goldman Sachs. Catie, your line's open.
Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for the time. Maybe just one on the fleet. You've talked about that you've sourced 21 incremental aircraft since the start of the year, but your 2021 CapEx has remained the same since February. Did you have line of sight to these aircraft deals back then, or should we expect CapEx to step up a bit next year as the rest of those aircraft deliver?
Hey, Catie, it's Greg. Great question, and helpful for us to clarify that. Of several of the aircraft that we've acquired, like the deal I just mentioned with Air Lease, those are on a finance lease. I think from a net CapEx perspective, we're roughly in line. I think of those 10 aircraft, four will be delivered this year in 2021, and then the remaining will be next year. Under a finance lease, we didn't update our CapEx guidance to reflect that. Still, those 2021 numbers that we put out there today for full-year airline CapEx, we feel good about that from, I guess, to put it in like a cash CapEx perspective.
Got it. Very clear. Maybe a question for Scott. Last quarter, you were kind of hinting that we had some coming asset-light co-marketing and sales channel partnerships. That sounds like we got one with the Live Nation announcement. I just want to better understand how these types of relationships work. Is it just like if someone buys a concert in Vegas with maybe a credit card billing address or something like that outside of Vegas, will they get an email from Live Nation pushing an Allegiant fare? How does that work?
Yep
High level, how does the payment structure work for that type of marketing opportunity? Thanks so much.
You bet, no, and thanks for the question. You're exactly right. From the customer point of view, two things will happen in the select Live Nation and Ticketmaster venues that we're partnered with. As they buy tickets, they will be presented with Allegiant, and of course, ultimately, here at allegiant.com, we will be able to sell ticket inventory to those venues and events. Moreover, behind the scenes, one should think about this as a data, a digital, and of course, as we mentioned, a commerce partnership. It's the nature of these partnerships that enable us to reach so many more consumers in the markets that we collectively serve and be presented up exactly as you said. Sometimes digitally, sometimes physically, but gaining access to individuals and potential Allegiant customers in a very focused and targeted way. At this time, we've released that it's a multiple year.
We look forward to having a long-term relationship, but aren't disclosing any other financial arrangements other than to say that it's a two-way deal, where we will be looking to help them as a partner, and they will be looking to help us as a partner.
Got it. Thanks.
For the next question, we have Helane Becker from Cowen. Helane, your line's open.
Thanks very much, operator. Hi, everybody, and thank you very much for your time. Just kind of curious about fuel availability at some of your smaller airports on the West Coast. How is that working out for you? Are you able to get what you need? Are you tankering? How should we think about that? If you're tankering, what's the cost that we should think about that maybe not be there once this issue ends?
Hey, Helane, this is Scott Sheldon. What we've seen really since early summer is there's upwards of 20 markets, basically in the Midwest and the upper Northwest. Some still to this day don't have any availability, so all this is tankering. More often than not, most missions can be accomplished just by tankering. There's very few situations where we got to do a fuel tech stop. As far as the cost, clearly it's just the cost of extra pounds. You're starting to see what used to be upwards of 20 markets. I want to say I saw a list today, it's upwards of maybe 13. As fuel production comes back online, trucking and fuel supply logistics come back online, that stuff will be available for normal operations.
Gotcha. That's very helpful. Then the other question I have, not sure who can answer this or if it can be, but as we think about that capacity that you're talking about for rest of 2021 and 2022, had the pandemic not happened, what would the base have been like in 2020 so that, I don't know if you can do this, but on a pandemic-adjusted basis, what's the actual growth rate versus the year-over-two number?
Yeah, I'll take a stab as I obviously don't have the exact number off the top of my head, but we're going to be relatively close to where we expected on kind of that two-year horizon. If we're 20% now, that's going to be just shy of a 10% CAGR on both of those years. Maybe just a tick below where we had expected, but I don't think we're entirely far off where we thought we'd be at this point.
Yeah, I guess that was a better question. I'm sorry. That was a better way. Go ahead.
We grew the first two months of the year 16%. That gave you an indication. 2019 was not as much growth, it was only 9%, because we had limited airplanes coming out of 2018 when we finished our transition. We were fast looking to kick it up a little bit as we went into 2020.
Oh, yeah. Okay. That's really helpful. All right. Well, thanks, Maury. Thanks, team. Thanks for those answers. Very helpful.
For the next question, we have Mike Linenberg from Deutsche Bank. Mike, your line's open.
Good afternoon, everyone. Just a quick one here on when you look at the markets that are the traditional Allegiant markets, now we have, I don't know, four or five carriers who seem to all be targeting some of these interesting markets, like Mesa, Arizona, Punta Gorda, Bellingham. I'm just curious, on the surface, it looks like you're going to have a lot more competition on one hand. On the other, some of the city pairs are different, and in fact, there's a halo effect, I guess, if you will, that these airports that were probably not on the radar screen, when you have a Southwest Airlines now flying to Fresno and Bellingham and the Florida Panhandle, that there actually may be some benefit to Allegiant, especially if these markets aren't duplicative from a city pair presence.
Just curious on whether or not it's driving more traffic to some of these smaller airports and there's a halo effect and you're benefiting from it. Thoughts on that? Thank you.
Sure. Yeah. Drew here. At the time of announcement, we definitely see kind of a traffic halo effect. I think probably still too early to say what the long-term impact of that's going to be. I'm certainly going to stop short of saying that I embrace their presence in our airports. In terms of traffic and awareness, I think you'll definitely see it in the short term, and we'll circle back in 12 months and talk about the long term.
The only thing else I would add there is, depending on the carrier, as you all well know, we are all nonstop flights, and in many cases, where those competitive routes are really bringing someone say to Las Vegas to connect on a flight to somewhere else, it's kind of the halo effect that is driving exposure from, in that case, an origination point. Does very little actual competitive damage since the person really isn't flying to be where our endpoint is. Thank you.
Yeah. Just to finish that off, Michael, everything we do is point-to-point, so you don't have any hub. A lot of this activity, even Southwest anymore, is going through a hub. It's a connection. If you're doing BWI to VPS, that's nice. If they're connecting all the way up into the Northwest or into some of our cities, it's not as competitive a product, we think. We'll see.
Just one second question on, as we think about PSP and the various restrictions that it does have on Allegiant. Greg, maybe can you just remind us, at what point do the shackles come off? I realize there's a really cheap loan that you're benefiting from, and so I'm not sure, sort of, where things come out, whether or not that has to be paid down completely before you could reinstitute a dividend, potentially consider share repurchases, pay executives more handsomely than in the past. What's the timing on that and how are you thinking about that? Since, among all the carriers, you're in the best position to kind of come away from that and to get out from under the microscope of the government.
Hey, Mike, thanks for the question. It's Greg. The shackles come off October 1st of next year in terms of dividend, the ability to issue a dividend again and share repurchases and the like there. In terms of executive comp restrictions, I think that's April 1st of 2023.
Okay
Into perspective. We are in a nice liquidity position, as we talked about. We have the largest shareholder sitting here to my left, so I wouldn't be surprised if we consider returning value to shareholders, either through the form of a dividend when those shackles come off, or even looking at a share repurchase. Nothing to speak to today. It's just something we'll keep in the back of our minds. I would just say, to your point about executive comp and just, I think that the company, Maury, John, and the board, have done a really nice job of getting creative to ensure that our executive and our senior leadership team are well taken care of through the pandemic and beyond. We've tried to get creative in that way, and my sense is that everybody's pretty happy with what they've been able to do.
Great. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, everyone.
For the next question, we have Duane Pfennigwerth from Evercore. Duane, your line's open.
Hey, thanks. I appreciate it. Congrats on these results. Just with respect to the breakage, what line does that fall in? Is it all passenger revenue or base fare? Could we see more breakage in future quarters?
Hey, Duane. This is Greg. I'll kick it off, and if Drew wants to add. It's basically spread throughout, so you'll see it in sched and third party, just proportionally. I'd think about it from that perspective. The way I would just think about it on a go-forward basis is in the second quarter, really why you saw the number as large as you did is that we were catching up, right? I think on a go-forward basis, I would just expect it to be back at a more of a normalized run rate pre-pandemic.
Okay, great. In the disclosure, just going back and looking at hotel room nights sold, almost 73,000. Can you talk about attach rates? If I recall, Vegas had a higher attach rate, so maybe you could talk about where attach rates are trending and how you see that across some of the bigger leisure destinations.
Yeah, I'll kick that off, maybe then if, Scott, if you have anything. The biggest thing to watch with hotel room nights and what's kind of tracked historically is the distribution of seats that touch Vegas. Our attach rate here is by far the best in the system, and we've kind of slowly been drifting away from Vegas as a percentage of the whole, really over the last 10 years. You've kind of seen that through the hotel results, and of course, that's offset by the higher East Coast presence in rental cars. There's a pretty clean correlation between that.
I would say strategically, there remains a lot of upside. I provided a similar metric back in 2019, but I have an updated one. For every one hotel stay that is attached, there are 15 that are actually put in the shopping cart, but not checked out on. A lot of what we will be doing to help bridge the difference in those 14 that make it all the way to the shopping cart, but don't get checked out, are a variety of these initiatives. Greg referenced some as strategic marketing initiatives and are part of just our continued digital evolution in the next six to 12 months.
Thanks. Just on Vegas specifically, I don't know if you have, you're not revenue managing hotel rooms yet, to the extent you have a view into Vegas, what are you seeing into the fall and September specifically, as some of these large conferences come back online? We've heard anecdotally rates are very high relative to kind of where they've been.
In general, Vegas is holding up reasonably well for us into the fall. Certainly it doesn't experience quite the same seasonal chaos that Florida will through September and through the fall. On the hotel side, things still look fine in general, kind of on par with what we've seen through the summer. I would stop short of saying that we're a big beneficiary of conferences directly, especially when it comes to the hotel. We'll see little lifts here and there, but it's not quite as clean as conference comes back, we should see a massive uptick here. I'd pause a little bit short of that.
The one additional point I'd make about Las Vegas is where we are a direct beneficiary and inextricably linked will be on the at least nine weekends of NFL games at Allegiant Stadium. Many have seen that six of the top 10 selling NFL games as determined by overall secondary market ticket prices are home games here at Allegiant Stadium. Drew and Kristen and team have done a terrific job of standing up capacity in those visiting markets, be it Chicago, Baltimore, et cetera. For the leisure traveler on those weekends, and there's a variety of other major events that will be happening, one, the yield should be way up hotel, to directly answer your question. And two, Allegiant does have a very natural play, and we're seeing that pay dividends with the investment with Allegiant Stadium.
Thanks for the thoughts.
Thanks, Duane.
For the next question, we have Savi Syth from Raymond James. Savi, your line's open.
Yeah, thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Appreciate the longer-term outlook here, but curious on how you're thinking about how post-summer looks like in the third quarter.
Sure. In terms of what? Demand or-
Exactly. I mean, a lot of your seats, I think, are in September, so are you expecting the load factors to drop and/or yields to drop? How should we think about how post-summer looks this year versus kind of historical or even last year?
My view on September, keep in mind, as I mentioned in the opening remarks, September is still about 50% the size of July. It's still the smallest portion of the quarter and really even the year. With that, I do think that there's a chance load factor will step back a little bit. It naturally does. I do think the floor continues to lift a little bit on what it could be. People that were priced out of summer trips because of hotel rates, because of rental car inventory and rates, will be kind of shifting that travel into the fall period. I do still expect a leisure fall-up as we would always expect, I do think the floor is a little bit higher than normal.
Makes sense. Maybe on the aircraft side, just curious how many of the aircraft that you've secured has been since the capital raise, which is four aircraft. Just kind of tied to that from an operational, whether this is Scott or Greg, just historically, I think of Allegiant taking about one aircraft a month, and that's something that the team's been able to handle without too much disruption. What's your view on taking kind of 21 aircraft next year?
Hey, Savi, it's Greg. I'll kick it off and then turn it over to Scott or BJ here. 13 since the capital raise is how many we've signed up, 13 aircraft this quarter post-May. In terms of bringing these aircraft in the pipeline, Scott Sheldon and Robert Neal here and their respective teams have put together a really nice facility, induction facility in Melbourne to make sure that we kind of de-risk that pipeline and getting those aircraft rolling through. BJ or Scott, anything you want to add on that front?
Yeah, I think in order to obviously deploy the aircraft, the hiring for pilots started early July. We're hiring upwards of 270 pilots, upwards of 360 flight attendants, and I suspect that that hiring cadence won't end. We're kind of at the upper threshold of what we can do, just from a training footprint internally, and so the factory's back in high gear, so to speak.
Got it. Thank you.
Savi, it's Maury. One other thing, too, that we've got to get the system back in place, too. The biggest surprise to me is the dislocation of everything that's going on, personnel being the number one issue. Many people are leaving bags and people at the gate because they can't get through TSA. I mean, it's an amazing As I said, the rust is still lingering around the operation. That's going to be, to me, a marker as to how fast we can get into 2022 as well. You go back and look at the operations of the industry in 2018 and 2019, it was really top-notch, and the industry has not held its end of the bargain up. So much of that, too, is not under our control. I think we're short 10,000 TSA agents, something like that. Yeah.
We got to get the whole system back up. All the supply chain conversations you are hearing, we are right in the middle of one of ours.
Got it.
For the next question, we have Hunter Keay from Wolfe Research. Hunter, your line's open.
Hey, thank you. Hey, Scott DeAngelo. As you studied other loyalty programs in the airline industry, what are some of the biggest features, obviously not of your own, of competitor programs that you find people really strongly dislike the most?
Thank you for the question, Hunter. The biggest thing was we found, just so you know, about 30%-40% of our customers are members of, name your top programs, SkyMiles, Rapid Rewards, AAdvantage. The big thing was about 90% said they didn't benefit from those programs. They never flew enough to earn any kind of status, certainly not enough to get a free trip anywhere. Why we chose kind of the Apple Card, if you will, for those familiar with that, where you spend money, you get, in our case, points that earn effect currency, and you use it anytime you want for anything you can buy at allegiant.com.
What I think they dislike the most is the moving around of, and I'm going to include myself in this one, the moving around of some days it's 20,000, some days it's 60,000 miles, and other days, right, even if there's seats on the plane, there's blackout dates that they can't use their miles. Those would be the direct answer to your question that we decided just not even to play in that space, just give them the "Allegiant money," if you will. We don't call it that, but that's in effect what it is, and let them spend it as they see fit.
That's interesting. Thank you. Then Drew, the demand for leisure travel is amazing right now, I got to say, all things considered. Are you starting to think that maybe leisure travel is not as elastic as maybe a lot of us thought it was, or is this just kind of a flukish situation because of this perfect storm of stimulus money and low industry supply and pent-up demand? How is what you're seeing right now informing your overall sort of decision-making on revenue management over the next couple of years?
Yeah, I'm certainly inclined to believe the first 19 years of our company's history over the last 12 to 18 months in terms of price elasticity and customer behavior. I think this is very much the perfect storm of virtually missing out on an entire year of travel, stimulus checks, things really coming together to kind of drive different behavior. I think this really starts to revert to normalcy, really even in the back half of this year, by and large. We're even seeing it now, as kind of you've seen our loads return at the expense of some yield, which was our strategy all along, to hold yield up at the expense of load. I think we're in the midst of seeing that return to normalcy now, and we'll be back full-fledged pretty soon.
Got it. All right. Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Hunter.
For the next question, we have Dan McKenzie from Seaport Global. Dan, your line's open.
Questions here. With respect to the aircraft order, the 19 new aircraft next year, suggests you could potentially hit the 2024 aircraft goal of 145 planes a year early. I guess first question here, has that fleet goal changed?
Hey, Dan, it's Greg. I'll just say that, yeah, it gets us a nice head start on that. If you take a 10% CAGR in 2023 and 2024, I think that puts you closer to 160. As you know, we're always opportunistic here at Allegiant when it comes to acquiring aircraft, so we don't have an order out there or anything like that. BJ and his team will continue to look at the market and see what's available. Yeah, it gives us a nice jumpstart on that, and if you just take a 10% CAGR on those outer years, you're up to closer to 160.
Well, I think an add-on, Dan, too, is that if we have good deals on airplanes, which are presenting quite a few, we should buy those airplanes sooner, but that doesn't translate into you're going to put them into service right away. Operations will dictate that, a good deal is a good deal, and the marketplace won't hold these deals forever.
Yep. Understood. Okay. Then just also a multi-year question here, as you think about the business, reverting back to the 6 million in EBITDA per aircraft. Given the digital efforts that I think at past Investor Days, you've said are 3 x the profit potential of the airline operation, could the real answer be a profit contribution that's more than 6 million per aircraft in the next cycle? Does that include a Sunseeker contribution, and apologies for the Sunseeker question? I guess, where I'm going with this is, if the goal is to have 145 or 160 aircraft potentially in 2024, that seems to imply over $30 a share in earnings. I guess, just big picture, is this how you're thinking about running the airline?
Hey, Dan, it's Greg. Perhaps I'll kick it off, and Drew, DeAngelo or anyone else that may want to jump in here on the EBITDA per aircraft. The first note does not include Sunseeker. That would be excluded from it, or getting back to that number. If you think about it, I mentioned that we're bringing on more 186-seat aircraft. In 2019, those aircraft produced on average $8 million, maybe a little bit north of $8 million per aircraft, EBITDA per aircraft per year. I say that to say we believe that we can get back to that $6 million in EBITDA per aircraft. That's our goal today, to restore that as soon as possible. I do believe that there's upside to that as well.
Where we're at, I don't want to get ahead of my skis here and say we think it could be this or that, but job number one is getting back there. We feel like the cost structure's in place to support that, and then Drew and Scott DeAngelo, on the revenue side, see what they can do there, which would only help enhance that. Scott, you-
Yeah, the only thing I would add is just strategically, I think you're spot on. I know I've said it before, the most expensive thing any business, ourselves included, can do is attract customers to their store, in our case, the digital store, allegiant.com. Once in the store, the most accretive thing we can do is have them add more things to that shopping cart. We talk a lot here about selling beyond the aircraft. So yes, base fare, but all the air ancillary that Drew talked about, the third party. To double emphasize what Greg said, there's absolutely upside as we're able to sell more of different things beyond the aircraft to the customers that were already paying to come into the stores, just getting them to put more in their cart.
Mm-hmm. Understood. If I could just squeeze one last one in here, Drew, 13% of the ASMs in routes less than 12 months. I'm curious, one, what the RASM discount to the system average RASM was in the second quarter, and then as we look at 2022, what should we anticipate in terms of the % of flying that would be in markets less than 12 months?
Thanks. Yeah, I don't have the 2Q number in front of me in terms of RASM discounts, I'll have to come back to you on that one. In terms of route distribution, it's only 7.4% in the second quarter, it really is a back half of the year story in terms of new routes. Being 7.4%, you're going to be relatively in line with what we've done over the last three to four years. You probably wouldn't notice anything material on a comparison basis.
Was it 2020? Yep.
Yeah. Going into 2022, I still anticipate a fair amount of new route growth. I think the distribution will come down a little bit as we do more same-store growth, kind of filling in some gaps there. I'd expect something south of that 13%-14%.
Very good. Thanks for the time, you guys.
Thank you.
For the next question, we have Conor Cunningham from MKM Partners. Conor, your line is open.
Hey, everyone. Thanks for the time. It seems like you're clearly prioritizing yields during the recovery over load factors. Just on the other side of the pandemic, should we assume that you're willing to take a lower load going forward as maybe to protect yields, or are you going to revert back to your historical norm of trying to just get people on planes and then drive revenues through the ancillary fees? Thank you.
Yeah, Conor, more generally, it's promoting load factor over yields as we look forward. Really, the question for us came down to the size of demand pool, and as the demand pool was smaller, we thought it made more sense to prioritize the yield as we weren't stimulating enough incremental customers to fly with discounted rates. As that pool has generally returned to on par, if not larger for us here into the summer, it made sense to revert back to older strategies of pushing that load. Now, not 100% of the network is all the way there yet, and there are places where yields still make sense, but by and large, the rule of thumb is pushing that load factor once again.
Okay, great. Then you guys always have interesting data points on your customer base. I think in the first quarter you mentioned that people that have booked or flown on your airline have a vaccination rate of above 70%. Curious where that sits today. The reason why I ask is there's a lot of conversations going around about the Delta variant, mask mandates, and all that stuff that could hurt demand. It just seems like your customer base is more insulated from any COVID-related issues going forward. I appreciate the time. Thank you.
Yeah, I'll quickly answer that. It basically is in the high 70s, so much like we've seen everywhere else. Three months later, it's climbed up as many as eight percentage points, but in that 80/20 and long tail from here, not just our customer base, but the nation as a whole.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
For the next question, we have Chris Stathoulopoulos. Chris, your line's open.
Hey, good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for taking my question. Two from me. As we work into leisure recovery here and looking at cost, are there areas that you're doing better in versus others that perhaps have come on faster than you might have expected or might be harder to work off as you spool back up in capacity?
Hey, Chris, this is Greg. Sorry, you broke up on there for a minute there. On the cost side, you just want to know if there's areas that we're performing better as we spool up capacity. I just want to make sure I understood it right.
Yeah. Areas that you're doing better. As you know, a few months ago, when demand really started to take off relative to today, areas that you're perhaps outperforming in versus areas that there's a little bit more pressure than you expected or perhaps areas that might be harder for you to work off through productivity or other measures. Thanks.
Yeah. No. Okay, I got you. All right. Some of the areas that I think we're doing a lot better on today as compared to the pandemic as we ramp up. In our other area, in our other line item, we've seen some benefit from things such as taxes and just training efficiency, things like that. We've driven some tailwinds on that front. I'll say, though, as we start to ramp up, we're going to see, and we bring on more pilots, as Scott Sheldon alluded to, we're going to probably see some headwinds down the road on that. I think where we sit today, I feel good about that. Some of the headwinds that I mentioned earlier, like on the airport cost, we think those are transitory. Those will go away.
We also mentioned that our ground service providers, in my opening comments, I talked about that. Those are inflationary, and we're doing what we can to make sure that they have the pay to remain competitive there. Ultimately, the other areas that we're trying to do better on, I think from a capital perspective as well is like aircraft. I mentioned that as BJ and his team are out there finding aircraft for 30% discount, that's meaningful savings in this pandemic world. To put that into perspective, if that's $6 million per aircraft that's discounted, and we just signed up 24 aircraft since the onset of the pandemic, that's like $150 million you're saving. Last quarter, I talked about a little bit the Strategic Parts Initiative, where we went out and we allocated $20 million for strategic parts that we ended up getting like a 50% discount.
Essentially $40 million worth of strategic parts that we paid $20 million on. Those are ways that we are, I think, taking what the pandemic has thrown at us and being more efficient, combating some of these inflationary costs and just doing the best we can in that regard. I hope that answered your question. Let me know if there anything I could follow up on with that.
Okay. Just as a follow-up on the other side. Curious, and I know what makes your model unique is you have relatively lower route overlap, but could you comment at all on the fare dynamic you're seeing and if possible split that between some of the larger network peers and then versus some of your low-cost and ULCC peers? Thanks.
Yeah. The first thing I'll note here is that our general overlap with kind of mainline legacy flying is pretty low. I don't think I'll be able to give you a great read-through on that front. That's not fairly well biased by sample there. In general, there's been a lot of commentary lately from other carriers about third quarter yields being flat. Some folks even have mentioned the same thing for June. I think the pricing environment, at least from where we sit in the leisure world, primarily into leisure markets, is that pricing is fairly healthy. I'm not concerned with what I'm seeing. We pushed higher yields in all three months of the second quarter. Like I said, we've heard the same from others. I'm not at least seeing a lot of weakness from where I sit.
Okay. Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Maury Gallagher for closing remarks.
Thank you all very much. We'll see you in 90 days. Have a good evening.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.