Good morning, welcome on behalf of Delta. It's so wonderful to see all of you in person. 2022 has been quite an eventful year. It seems like not that long ago, we were all together at the stock exchange. It was almost 12 months to the day. We're looking forward to updating you on the progress that we have made that we laid out last year.
Earlier this morning, we issued a press release and a presentation which can be found on ir.delta.com. There is a summary of the guidance that we provided today in the appendix on slide 34. Today, we will hear from Delta CEO, Ed Bastian, President Glen Hauenstein, CFO Dan Janki. Prepared remarks will run about an hour, and then we'll have about an hour for Q&A concluding at noon.
Before we get started, I'd like to give a special thanks to the investor relations team and the Delta events team for their hard work in putting today together. As a reminder, our discussion today will contain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events.
All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. Some of those factors that may cause such differences are described in our SEC filings. We'll also talk to non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of those measures, and our SEC filings are available on ir.delta.com. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce our Chief Executive Officer, Ed Bastian.
Well, thank you, Julie. It's great to see you all. Those of you that are on the webcast, welcome. Hopefully, in the future, especially for those who wanted an opportunity to see you live as well. Before I get started, I do want to clarify, this is a more of a financial update than a broader strategic update for the company.
I know there's so many exciting things going on in the company around the customer experience, around our international partnerships, around sustainability, and some of our ESG initiatives. We're gonna hold that discussion to June, and we're gonna set up a day and a half. Julie, we're still figuring out the logistics.
Julie, I think she's got a date, calendar date she's already, she's already, you know, looking to plan on, you can go twist her arm, and she'll kind of give you that date if you're comfortable, Julie. That's when we're gonna talk about the larger Delta, the longer term vision. This is very much focused on how we're doing on the three-year plan that, as Julie said, we were here a year ago and updated you on that. It's gonna be a bit of a more condensed, little tighter financial discussion that we're gonna have. That said, I could not be more proud of the team in terms of how we performed this year.
If you remember a year ago, for those of you who were there, we were down at the stock exchange, I think literally a week prior, Omicron appeared on the scene. I teasingly tell people I may have been the only CEO in the country happy to see Omicron take the place of the other virus, in terms of name, because I was so tired of hearing Delta, Delta, Delta. I would turn around, I'd, you know, every half hour I'd hear something about Delta, I'd have to pay attention to what was going on. Oh, it's the virus. We're through that.
There was a lot of uncertainty as to how Omicron. It was very much a stepping back, because I think when we were here at the start of this year, people were finally to travel, finally getting back into the office, and everything got delayed, you know, one more time. Of course, we saw the terrible breakout of war in Europe and Ukraine and what that did, not just to the geopolitical uncertainty for already a fragile European continent, but what it did to commodity prices, what it did to energy prices. We saw this year the highest jet fuel prices in our history this year. It wasn't just the commodity, it was the crack and jet fuel prices.
We saw labor continuing to escalate in terms of pricing, in terms of the constraints of staffing. Fortunately, we saw the return of travel finally come all at the same time without any big warning. It just showed up. We went from our planes at the start of the year being relatively about 50% full.
By March, we're 100% full, and the stress and the strain that put on the entire aviation system. Against that backdrop, all of which were kind of pretty tough to plan for, given the nature of these items, to deliver the plan that our people did. They hit the $2.6 billion pre-tax estimate that we announced this morning. Not only on plan, but even slightly ahead of plan.
I think it's really been a great job by the team. You know, the staffing situation, we did this with 25,000 new people. Literally one out of every four Delta employees are new within two years. This is a highly technical, highly sophisticated, challenging industry that we operate in. When you see that, on the one hand, it's great to have the new generation coming rapidly to the company. We have great talent that we've brought in.
At the same time, the experience set speaks to the leadership quality of the team. This team has great leadership, and it has a great operating principle and practice and mindset to be able to bring that many new people in quickly and generate industry-leading reliability as the Delta team did throughout the year, I thought was pretty impressive.
Pretty much since the July 1st , this company has been running darn close to our historical operational reliability metrics. Our on-time rates are 90% or better. Our reliability in terms of completion factor are at 99% plus, and they've been virtually every day post the first of July. Our baggage handling scores, we always call them mishandled bags, not lost bags.
We eventually find them. We just misplace them from time to time. We had the lowest scores of mishandled bags in the industry throughout the entire summer through the end of September. We don't have the October numbers yet from DOT, but I expect we're going to be number one when we see those again. The investments we made, the generational investments in the business, in the airports.
You see it here in New York at LaGuardia. You see it in LAX if you've been out there. You see it in Salt Lake City. You see what we're doing at JFK to continue to finish it. Generational investments made and opened this year during the course of recovering from a pandemic. Technology investments, just across the board.
We've put so many new opportunities to not just having weathered the storm for the last three years, but actually coming out of this stronger as a result of that. Our international partnerships that we retained, and, you know, we're coming out, you know, even better positioned as a result of having weathered this together really strong. The management team that we have here at Delta.
Some new leaders that we brought in to the company over the last few years that have brought some great new talent. As a team, I know there's not a better team in this industry than the leadership team, the management team of Delta. I dare say I've never worked at Delta, and I've been here for 25 years, and been CEO now finishing my seventh year.
I've never worked with a management team collectively that's more talented than the team here at Delta. You know, the momentum that we have as we're exiting 2022, going into the new year is very, very palpable. Hopefully, you saw that with our guidance upgrade up in terms of fourth quarter performance and what we're looking at for 2023 that we issued this morning.
Against that backdrop, in my 25 years at the company, while it was the most challenging environment I ever saw in 2022, I've never seen a more constructive industry backdrop than we have today. You're all familiar with many of these factors. The constraints that we have around supply chain, around the OEMs, the capacity challenges that this industry always struggles with is a very different outlook than ever before.
You see the demand drivers. I'm going to spend some time talking about these this morning, in terms of It's not just pent-up demand. I think this is sustainable, strong demand that we're going to see for an extended period of time like never before. When you look at the new travel patterns, everyone is hyper-focused on corporate travel.
Everyone wants to know what's your corporate travel number. Our corporate travel number is around 80% return. By the way, we said all through the pandemic, we never expect it to come back as it left in 2019. We may only get to 80%-90%. That's okay because we have so many new forms of travel by those same individuals because mobility means you can actually work wherever you are. It doesn't mean that you have to be in the office to do it. We find so many new ways in which people are traveling. The pandemic lessons that were learned over this course of time.
You know, we are all, as I said, we're all running a pretty good industry right now, and the numbers I mentioned at Delta, I'm pleased to say our competitors are also doing a pretty good job on that. It's fragile because we all have new people, we all have new processes, and the risk of overshooting your capabilities is too high for anyone to take.
We are not going to continue to grow into this operational opportunities until we're confident we have the skills, the experience, and the talent in place. While you've heard across the industry many of the forecasts for industry growth, we're all looking to restore, we're all looking to get back. I'd say that's largely aspirational as compared to substantive. Hopefully, we'll be able to get there by summer, but I'm not certain.
It's not something I worry to have. We're not going to grow there until we're confident we can deliver against that. Finally, that leads into strength in financial momentum. Before I get into the financial numbers, I know you all want to know what's going on. You know, does this include new pilot agreement? Does it not? You know, how are we thinking about this?
We've embedded in our key financial metrics the assumption that the AIP does go and gets ratified. Of course, that's up to the pilots, and I'm not going to talk about the AIP for that reason. Out of respect for the process, we'll let our pilots decide what's best for them. The assumption is that the agreement that was made, the AIP with the negotiating committee of ALPA is embedded there.
The EPS guide that you see growing next year from $5-$6 from $3 in 2022 assumes that the deal is approved, and it's in that number. As well as the 2024 number. The double-digit operating margin that you see in these materials assume that the pilot deal is approved. Our leverage metrics assume it's approved, and free cash flow also assumes it's approved with one slight caveat, is that the signing bonus, the upfront payment, we're gonna treat as an off item, as a non-recurring because it relates to an unusual factor. It's not in the normal operating course. Put that aside. That's what you'll see the free cash flow numbers north of $2 billion that we're providing.
That's about as much detail as we're gonna give you, okay? Don't ask Janki about what it means to CASM or Glen what it means to revenue. We understand the questions. We'll answer the questions when we know if we have a deal or not. The metrics that really matter that we want you focused on profitability, leverage, margins, and cash, that's embedded in these assumptions.
I'm going to spend most of my time this morning, and I won't spend 30 minutes, I promise you. This is gonna move. Glen and I already have a private bet what my over-under is gonna be. Talking about the industry, okay? Yeah, we have a great story here at Delta, and I'm gonna leave most of the discussion of the great Delta story to Glen and to Dan to describe.
I want to step back and look at the industry because we all operate in a large ecosystem. There's factors at play that I think people are still having a hard time either coming around learning about this industry for the first time, or they forgot, or they kind of dialed out during the pandemic.
There's some reasons why, first and foremost, the top question that many of you have as to how sustainable this revenue demand picture is. We think it's sustainable. This is a picture that many of you have seen over time. This portrays how much air travel spend is of GDP on an annualized basis, and it goes back to the last 40 years. There is 1 number that jumps off the page at you.
It's 1.3%. That's the average year in and year out of air travel spend. It's domestic travel, international travel into our country, out of our country. It's not just the U.S. airlines, but it's all travel related to our country is of total GDP. It was 1.3% through the 1980s. It was 1.3% through the 1990s. It broke on 9/11 for obvious reason, came back, you know, relatively quickly. You see a little bit of a downtick in 2009, 2010. That was the recession that we had. You saw it overcorrect in the out years. For the last decade, the average number was 1.4%.
Wasn't just 1.3%, there's various, you know, reasons why it might have ticked up just a touch. If you look at the last three years in terms of what the inherent demand for travel would have been, absent the pandemic, what people wanted to do and what they actually could do in terms of travel, there's a massive gap.
There's $300 billion of missing demand that we've had over these last three years. When people say, "Where is the strength coming from? Is this just pent-up demand or are people gonna get tired of going on trips, and when is this gonna run out?" I don't think it's gonna run out for an extended period of time. I'm saying that based on history. You know, we all have our views.
We got our crystal ball. Candidly, our crystal ball is not much better than the next 90-120 days. Glen will talk about that, and it looks pretty good. As you look out over the course of next year, and I think for several years to come, this, you know, $300 billion of missing demand, not all of it's coming back, obviously, but you know, some of it will.
It's gonna be a big number, whatever that number eventually turns out to. Just in 2022, if you look at what the gap is to 2023, and we're making the assumption for 2023 that it's a flat GDP picture in the U.S. I'm not sure if that's conservative or not, but that's the assumption we used in this model.
There's $30 billion just for 1.3% of travel spend in an incredibly hot market for travel. That's $30 billion that will come in next year for the industry. Delta's 15%-17% of these numbers, so you can do your math for Delta. That's assuming no catch-up. Just travel demand consistent with past practices.
This has sustainability, and this is one of the, I think, the core reasons why people are looking at what's going on here and why is this different. This chart is different 'cause people love to travel, and this is part of our behavioral opportunity going forward to continue to capture not just the travel, but the premium and the higher end portion of that travel.
Secondly, there's a lot of discussion on capacity. You all hear us, as I said, aspirationally talking about bringing our system. We're aspirationally planning to get back by summer to 100% of 2019 capacity. You know, people, you know, rightfully say, "Wow, this is the airlines doing some of their old bad habits." You know, starting at good times, they grow too fast, it turns into bad times.
This is not the case, okay? Look at this chart. This chart is a depiction of where we were at the end of 2019, basically the start of the pandemic. What the analysts forecast, there's a couple analysts here I can't read small print as to who we use, but whoever you are, thank you for contributing your report.
At the end of 2019, the expectation was the industry by the end of 2022 would have grown capacity to 116% of 2019 levels. So a 16% growth. Where we actually are is we're at 91% of 2019 in 2022. It's a 25-point gap between what expectations were and by the way, where demand is, because demand based on GDP is 18%-20% higher than 2019, and where actual capacity sits. You say, "Okay, well, how quickly is that going to close?" Well you look at the constraints we have, these constraints are substantive. As I said on the Squawk Box interview this morning, we tried. We tried to grab it and we broke, you know, this spring.
I mean, we just can't move faster than we are. We're all working. Pilot constraints obviously being the chief of those. When we had 2,000 pilots at Delta retire in the summer of 2020, we knew at that point it was going to take us three years to get back. We were okay with that because we didn't know how long this was going to take, and we'd rather be cautious and disciplined. We knew it would take us to the summer of 2023 just to get back to where we were in 2019. It's proving, you know, largely to be the case. We'll see if we can get there. As I say, it's a bit aspirational. Hopefully we can do it. You have that same issue all across the industry.
The further downstream you go within the industry, the more challenging this is because the musical chairs and pilots continue to jump. You saw what our, what our AIP was in terms of price. The size of that price tag just grows the further down the chain you go for the regionals and some of the lower fare carriers in terms of their ability to hold on to their pilots because they're all making moves, you know, for the future.
Think about the hiring and training needs, not just for our pilots, but for all of our staff, our mechanics, our reservationists, our airport workers, our flight attendants. We're still hiring flight attendants. It's a significant gap between where we need to be and how quickly we can move and where we sit today.
You look at the rising input costs. You know, with the fuel volatility we've seen going from the highest jet fuel prices we'd ever seen, you know, back down, there's a pretty significant amount of volatility that we're seeing in our input costs. Labor, fuel, inflationary pressures, all of which tell you to be cautious.
There's red flashing lights. You know, be disciplined as to how you're thinking about this. Then of course, the impact on industry infrastructure. We've all heard the discussions that's going on air traffic control, and do we have enough staffing, and is the system working? It's a challenge. The industry is very fragile. You know, next couple of years, hopefully we'll all be in a much healthier place to kind of start to absorb some growth.
For the next couple of years, this gap's not going to close a whole lot. Demand growth, I think, will continue and the ability to supply it will be strong. This is unique. My 25 years, some of you have been around a lot longer than me, never seen anything close to this. This is real. The third chart I want to depict, which is a little different message, is that there's a lot of old tapes that haven't died yet. One of the old tapes is, growth in the airline industry is bad. You know, just as a general theme, you know, growth can be good, growth can be bad, but if you're, if you're not disciplined, it is bad. Look at what this shows for the last 30 years.
Where did the growth in this industry, how was it sourced? It was sourced from better utilization of assets, not just growing for the sake of growing. In 1991, some of us remember this. I'll admit I was a business traveler back in 1991. I remember this. 60% was our average load factor. 60%. In 2000 it was 70%. It wasn't until we got to north of 80% did we actually have a sustainable business model. Okay? I'll give you just Delta's numbers on that. In 2010, we were about a break-even profitability. By the way, Yes, there was a recession going on, there was a merger going on, you know, put that aside, we were about a break-even, you know, business.
The latter half of the decade, from 2015 through 2019, our average operating margin was 14.5%. You ask me why? Yeah, we did a bunch of things. The main thing we did was we utilized the assets a heck of a lot better, and we no longer have that overhang of seat capacity that continues to suppress the pricing in this industry.
This is a factor, again, as you think about the other side of this. We are just trying to get back to that +30%. These are seats, by the way, not capacity. As Glen always reminds me, we don't sell ASMs, we sell seats. These are seats. We're just trying to get back to that 30% by the end of 2023.
That revenue picture that I showed you for 2019 is even higher in terms of that demand picture. To the extent that we bring back our assets and we return to service, I think it's the right thing to do, and certainly what Delta's going to do. It's going to take us a while to get there. We're adding those seats into a highly high asset utilization model that is at the crux of the strength of our pricing model.
You put those three charts together and you say, "Wow, well, you know, I think this could be an interesting, a few years, you know, for this industry. These are some of the thoughts and the discussions we've had internally as we've developed the plan that we're showing you relative to 2023 and to 2024.
In 2022, I already mentioned, hard year, challenging year. I can say in my 25 years working in this industry, I've never seen an operating environment like 2022. Just absolutely crazy. You say, "Well, geez, you were around for 2020 and 2021. They were pretty." Yeah, they were tough, but it wasn't like 2022.
I mean, 2020 was a tragic year with the COVID and the loss, and it was just trying to protect people. In 2021 you had a lot of stops and starts and the vaccine coming and not and trying to, you know, it was kind of, it was a frustrating year. 2022 was a hard year. It was a good year, but it was a hard year. The team did a magnificent job.
Best performance in the industry, profitability-wise, best performance in the industry, reliability-wise. We had our best customer satisfaction scores in our history in 2022. We've gained 5 points of Net Promoter Score in 2022, even against the crazy backdrop we've been through versus where we were in 2019.
As we exit 2022, our Net Promoter Scores are in the mid-50s. Our premium products continue to outperform. The diversity of our revenue streams continue to expand. The investments that we're making in our people are great. The investments that we're making in our facilities, the investments we're making in our technology. When the pandemic hit, we didn't pull back, we pushed forward. We've taken years off the development cycle of a lot of the long generational investments that you see this company making.
The reason why it's all showing up this year, that wasn't the plan. It was because we moved fast. We had confidence in the team that was making this happen. The strength of the financial performance, Dan will talk about that. While we are ahead of plan, certainly there's cost pressures that we experienced that are one of the things that didn't go as we anticipated. Dan will talk about that. Bunch of reasons why. When you think about the overall revenue environment, the cost backdrop, the margin performance, we think that 22 is a great table setter for 23. This is a picture of our operating margins and income over that period of time.
You can see that for the last three quarters, and this is updated for the guidance that we just issued for the fourth quarter, we're operating back to a double-digit operating margin in a recovery year with a lot of challenges attached to it. You can see at the bottom that we've narrowed that gap to 2019 performance from, you know, 6 points below 2019 down to one and a half points below in the fourth quarter. This is something that we're gonna take again into 2023 as we continue to look to grow that operating margin. The outlook for 2023 and 2024 are on this page. These are the key metrics that we're going to embed and speak to.
One of the things that's critical to 2023 for our company is that we move out of this hiring, training, kind of continue to push resources around into a production mindset. We're there. We have the assets to deliver this 15%-20% revenue goal. Yes, we have some planes on order and, you know, whether they all show up or not, I can't be sure, but I think the majority of them will.
We have the people, we have the assets, we have the capabilities. Can we pull this off? It's gonna be really a question of confidence in execution. 2023 for us is going to be a year we're slowing the hiring. We're starting to move more into production. You're gonna see that the cost profile is starting to come in.
You're gonna see the productivity levers continuing to return. You're gonna see people that will now have two to three years under their belts. They've seen the hardest time they'll ever see, it's just gonna continue to get better from here. That's not just true on our frontline side, that's true on our leadership front as well.
The operating margin guidance that we're expecting in 23, the midpoint of that, 11%, that's about a 300 basis point improvement over where we were. We came out in 2022. EPS of $5-$6 per share. That's almost double because we're closing 22 with a little over $3 a share. Close to double that in 23. Again, that embeds the assumption that we, the pilot deal is ratified and those costs are included. Free cash flow.
One of the differentiating factors of the business plan you're seeing today at Delta versus many of the other airlines in the industry is the return of free cash currently. We're not waiting to some time. We're delivering that now. We committed to you a year ago that we're going to have in excess of $2 billion of free cash flow in 2023, and we're continuing to reiterate that commitment to you this morning. By the way, $4 billion in 2024. We have, yes, we have assets. You know, we're managing our CapEx to somewhere between $5 billion and $6 billion a year. As I tell our team, there's a lot of things in this industry you can't control. CapEx you can control, actually.
We're gonna manage that because that we know is a key factor in making sure we hit these free cash goals, which will drive the leverage ratios down to, by the time we get to the end of 2024, we're gonna start to be spitting distance from investment grade metrics, which is our plan. Finally, you've heard me talk many times about Delta's competitive strengths, its advantages. I call them our moats. Our lawyers don't like that, so I've started to call these our superpowers. This is what makes Delta who we are. This is the same slide I showed you five years ago, and I'm showing you today.
When you think about the power of the moats, they've never been more tested than going through a pandemic. I got asked a question on the set this morning, "Can you save for a rainy day or a rainy pandemic?" It's kind of a silly question. Of course you can't. What you have instead is you have really strong moats that protect you and get you through tough times.
The people of this airline are the reason why we are as good as we are. You know, their service ethos, even with the 25,000 new people we have, they love this airline. They love the purpose of the airline. They're working hard to continue to deliver the productivity, efficiency, the service levels that's known, you know, in this industry.
It takes time to learn what that is, but we're on the path to get there. The operational prowess of this company is legendary. While we move different people into different roles, that operational prowess is back. Number one in on-time arrivals for the year, number one in completion factor, number one in mishandled bags throughout the summer.
These are numbers that are gonna continue to only get better looking forward. Glen's gonna talk a lot about what we did with the network. We are so thrilled with the approach we took. I'll say I'm thrilled, you know, around the network, particularly making certain that any growth you see coming into next year is coming into basically our backyard, into our strength markets, our core hubs.
We deliberately went out and put our capacity the last couple of years in the most competitive markets, New York, L.A., Seattle. Wanted to build up those investments we had made in the coast, kind of once in a generation opportunity to really establish, and we're number one now in many of those markets.
This is the year we come back home. We come back to Atlanta, we come back to Minneapolis, we come back to Detroit. This is where we make our money, and they bring more growth in. It's just going to have the opportunity to continue to grow the performance of those, the JVs I talked about.
We have awesome JV partners, all of whom went through a tough time, all of who have emerged, I think, in pretty good shape that we're going to continue to invest in. Loyalty, the brand is strong. Our American Express relationship is powerful. I think the co-brand spend is over 40% up versus 2019 levels on that card. I think we're looking at a $5.5 billion contribution from Amex. A year ago, remember I brought Stephen Squeri , there was a lot of questions, "Can Delta get to $7 billion?" He said, "Not only can they, I want them to." We're on path to get there by 2024, if not, hopefully exceed that.
The financial foundation is we took bullets, we took water in during the pandemic, but one thing we did not do is dilute our equity holders, and I'm proud of that. You know, we were able to borrow. We took on about $10 billion of net debt. Our equity holders, people that have stood by us, we didn't think it was right to dilute.
We were able to get through this without doing that. Hopefully, it'll be a testament that you will find on the other side of this was one of the things Delta strategically did that was very, very important as to a statement as to who we are. You put that whole picture together, you've got a company I think that's really poised. Listen, I've just been through a pandemic.
I'm not coming at you. I sound like I'm a little bit of rose-colored glasses, and I'm a born optimist, I appreciate. This company really is poised for some great growth. I think the demand picture is healthy. Glen's gonna talk about that. I think the cost opportunities are real. I think the performance in terms of the brand, performance of reliability, performance of the airline, what matters to customers that drive the connection that we have is just gonna continue to grow over the next year or two or three. This is gonna be a great opportunity. Very unique in terms of industry macros generally. You know, sometimes when you're different, it's time to pay attention, and I think this is one of those times. Thank you for that, and I'm gonna turn this over to my good friend, Mr. Glen Hauenstein.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and I'd like to add my thanks to all of you being here today, whether you're virtual or here in person. It's great to see everybody, and it's great to tell our story of 2022 and what we see shaping up for 2023. It was really, as Ed pointed out, an incredibly challenging year. If you go back and think we were here, well, we were down at Wall Street, but we were here on stage telling you what we thought 2022, our next three-year plan would be. We didn't know how bad Omicron would be. We didn't know how bad fuel price would be.
We didn't know that we'd have 30% of our regional fleet sitting on the ground. We didn't know that we'd miss our production targets by 5-6 points. We didn't know a lot of things that were gonna get thrown at us. To be here today and to be coming in at the upper end of our revenue range and being able to sit here and come at the upper end of our guidance, I think is a really exciting and it proves the durability and the flexibility of the model in general and Delta in particular. I wanna call out the team. I know they're watching at home, and I wanna make sure that I thank them too because they did an incredible job, and they did an incredible job producing the products.
They also did an incredible job forecasting the revenue. I'm gonna call out the revenue team. I got a lot of questions this morning because some of our competitors have been talking about maybe a weaker than expected December and how that rolled in. I will say that back in September when we were looking at guidance to issue for the fourth quarter, of course this is always a discussion because these are numbers we see 30 days out or 90 days out, and that's a little bit of some guesswork there. The team had from the very beginning said that December was gonna be the off-trend month relating to the calendar, and I think they did a fantastic job forecasting that early in the curve.
As we sit here today, I think, you know, being above the midpoint of guidance, and talking about where we see first quarter revenues, the December month was the off-trend month into January. January will be significantly better than December. February, we think will be better than January, and March, we think will be better than February. That's all versus 2019. I'm gonna point that out here.
I don't know about you, but we're all getting really tired of this 2019 number. It's getting to be quite stale. If you think about our year and as we went through the year to get to the $2.6 billion profit that we are talking about today, having lost almost around $1 billion in the first quarter, that means the last three quarters of the year, we produced at about a 3.5.
When we get to the end of the first quarter, and we get past Omicron, we're gonna sunset our relationship to 2019, and we're gonna move it to 2022. I think we give an applause to 2019. It's been a very good benchmark year, but we are all looking forward to retiring 2019 as our, as our benchmark.
Last before we leave this slide is that we are in the middle of our corporate survey. I know many of you were asking me this morning about what are we hearing from corporates. Usually we get about 400 surveys back. We launched it last week. We have about 200 back today as of today or as of yesterday when I last checked. What we see is a 93% response rate that they expect to spend more in one Q than they did in four Q, which is the highest number in sequential that we've had all year. That's another very exciting point we want to hit on that what we're seeing from corporates is we're expecting a very good step up as we head into one Q.
You know, I talked about 2022 being a very difficult year, I think it really does prove out the real competitive advantages that Ed talked about. Deepened network advantages, I'm gonna talk about that in another slide or two. We are committed to our long-term strategy that we outlined last year, I think it's paying big dividends, I think it's going to pay dividends not in 2023 but in 2024 and beyond. I'll talk a little bit about that. I exceeded all our commercial goals. We have Dwight James in the room here. I'm gonna give my applause to his loyalty team. Let's give them a round of applause. They did an amazing job, we had another year of record acquisitions. We crossed 1.1 million acquisitions.
I have a slide on that later, so I'm gonna save the rest of that punchline. Expanding premium revenue, we of course put more premium seats into the marketplace. We're gonna do that again in 23. As we've talked all along, premium has led the recovery. I think if you asked us in the beginning how would premium do in a pandemic, I don't know that any of us in this room would have thought that that was the leader in terms of profitability and in terms of getting us out. It's been very, very resilient. It's been very resilient not only with the corporates but with leisure, and it's very, very sticky. I'll talk a little bit about that later, is once you start sitting up there, you tend not to go back.
I think we all, you know, that we have all experienced that. Once you're sitting up front and traveling up front, hard to go back into the coach product. Increased revenue diversification. That's been one of our key themes. I think we've made a lot of great progress this year, but we've got a long ways to go still and a long runway.
With that, talk a little bit about our capacity restoration here. This is a really exciting story. When we knew we would be constrained when we were coming out of the pandemic. The question is: well, what did you want to service, and what were your goals? I think our goals were that we wanted to maintain our share in our core hubs.
As we look through second quarter DOT data, we have increased our share in our hubs. I'm gonna talk about that in the next slide because that was a little tricky thing to do. When we think about where we need to go from here, it's about restoring back to 19 levels. What I want to talk about is that fact that Ed talked about is ASMs versus seats. A lot of you in this room have historically used ASMs as the precursor. I used to give this example to our team is if we add one flight to India, we add about 1% of ASMs, and we add, like, 0.1% in seats or 0.01% in seats.
Really filling up those 200 or 300 seats if you add something very long haul is very different than filling up more seats in the domestic or North American marketplace. If you look at the key slide here, I think this is even more important that our seats in 2022 were only 86% restored. In 2023, we will not get back to full seat restoration for the year.
We will be selling 2% fewer seats in our most current estimates than we sold in 2019. Still not getting to the number of seats we had in 2019. That is a very different by quarter. By fourth quarter, we hope to be actually slightly ahead. Throughout the first three quarters of the year, we will be below our seat counts in 2019.
Of course, departures being way down, and I'm gonna use the next slide to talk about the efficiency of the fleets. The last thing I want to point out is that comment I made earlier about our regional jet fleet being underutilized. We have between 80 and 100 regional jets out of our 325 two class RJs that are now underutilized or not being utilized. That is one of the things that we're gonna carry through most of 2023. We do not think that this is going to resolve itself until 2024.
In other words, that the RJ pilot shortage will be with us throughout this entire year. We're expecting it to start to loosen up when we look at how many people are coming through the schools and what the demand is at the major carriers. The last thing I want to hit on this slide is, of course, fleet efficiency.
I'll get to that in a few minutes. I have a very exciting factoid for those of you who fly on us, and I know most of you in this room do fly on us. Thank you for your business. We will be the first carrier in the United States, we believe this summer, to be the only airline with first class on every seat, every flight, every day. Every seat, every flight, every day.
That deserves a round of applause. That took us a long time to get to, but I think will be very appreciated. We think America deserves a first class airline. We think that first class airline is, of course, Delta. I want to talk a little bit about how we restored the network and what we accomplished and what we have still to go.
When we knew we would be constrained coming out of the pandemic, we had two things that we wanted to accomplish. We wanted to take advantage of a generational opportunity to solidify our positions in our coastal gateways. Our coastal gateways include Boston, LaGuardia, Seattle, Los Angeles, and we wanted to maintain our core hub share.
If you look at the previous slide and you say you had 86% of your seats restored in 2022, and we were actually larger in terms of seats in every one of our coastal gateways except New York, which was pretty much flat, but a large expansion in Boston, a large expansion in Los Angeles, and a moderate expansion in Seattle.
What happened to the core? The core had really constrained seats. Minneapolis, Detroit, Atlanta in particular, Salt Lake being a little more restored than those three. Our core engine, the core engine that fuels the profits of Delta, was the least restored. If you take the 86 and you say the coastals were restored at 100% or more, that meant that your coastals were below 80, well below 80.
They said, "Okay, if you're actually actively managing your revenue management systems to favor the local," because the reason local was important to us is we didn't want to cede our most loyal customers and open up opportunities for low cost or ultra-low cost in our hub markets. We needed to maintain that, and we did. We have actually gained 2 points of local market share throughout the pandemic, from where we exited versus where we came in in 2019.
That meant somebody didn't get on the airplane. The people that didn't get on the airplane were the people who were in the outstations who saw fares that were significantly above our competitors' fare structure. These are high-yield customers, and we saw this not only in our traffic numbers, but we saw it in our corporate shares.
We gained corporate shares in our hubs, we gained corporate shares in our coastal gateways, and we lost corporate share in key business markets across the Southeast in particular and the upper Midwest. As we look to rebuild our network back in 2023, people this morning had asked me, "Well, why do you think yours is easier?" You know, everybody says theirs is easy, right?
Nobody's going to say theirs is hard. But what I think we did, we did the heavy lifting during the pandemic. It would have been much easier for us to say, "Let's shrink the coastal cities, and we'll concentrate on our core, and we'll drive the maximum profitability through 2022." We chose not to do that.
We chose to take a longer view and say we wanted to maintain and increase our shares in the coastal gateways because without that, our opportunity for growth in the future is somewhat limited. We wanted to do that, and we wanted to make sure our core was maintained. This year is about three
things. It's about increase engage, getting those customers back, ensuring that we have adequate capacity in the coastal cities. I think that is a much easier setup for 23 and beyond than had we done it the other way and that this year we were starting to build back Los Angeles or Boston. We didn't go into we didn't go into the recession or the pandemic with a number one share in revenue in Boston. We went in with a distant number two.
We didn't go in with a number one share in Los Angeles. We came in as number two. Coming out of the pandemic with number one in those two key cities, which are both, of course, Los Angeles being the largest single airport revenue market in the country and Boston being in the top 10. Those are really important for not only today but for tomorrow's development as well.
I'm really proud of the team. We set those objectives up. We executed on them. When we look back in the rearview mirror, we can put a big check mark on having accomplished what we set out to do and really, I think, setting us up incredibly well for 2023 and 2024. Another thing I just want to point out is that we have a relative revenue headwind by doing what we did.
Our coastal gateways have a lower RASM, and our interior hubs have a 20% higher RASM when you take that. As we look towards 2023, we'll be looking at getting some of that RASM premium. We still have the highest RASM in the of network carriers, but getting some of that premium back that we had in 2019.
That's my thesis on why, our, ours might be easier or should be easier than our competitors, mostly being driven by gauge and frequency in the core hubs. Of course, we also had a lot transpire with our global networks our and our partners over the pandemic period. I want to stop a little bit and say how excited I am with, where we sit with our, with our partners.
I think the most exciting one, I'm going to go to LATAM right away because this is new. In 2019, we announced it right before the pandemic, it took us through the entire pandemic. Thanks to Peter and the team for getting us the ATI. We got that a couple of months back, we are hitting the ground running with LATAM. Of course, this is the region that we had, we had the number three position historically. We really with our previous partners in goal, we really didn't have a way to get to be number one. We like to be number one. We think there's a lot of benefit in that in terms of distribution and presence.
Switching to LATAM and getting that approved is a great accomplishment for things that we did during the pandemic. We're hitting the ground running. We actually have a meeting with them in Miami this Thursday, where we're gonna celebrate the initial wins. I think we've our teams have been together for the last two and a half months creating checklists and work plans, and we see some great opportunities to continue to expand our number one position in South America as we move forward with LATAM. The other one I'd like to talk to, which also transformed during the pandemic, was Korea. Korean, of course, as you know, was the largest transpacific carrier in and of itself, and they're now able to join forces with Asiana. That's in the process of being approved globally now.
Once you put them together, they will have by far the largest hub in Asia and one that we can connect to and really funnel most of our Asia traffic that we're not going to serve nonstop over their hub. For those of you who have used it, and hopefully you have if you travel at all to Asia, we believe by far it is the best customer experience and the best connecting complexes, and those are only going to get better over time. Really something that's transformed during the pandemic. Of course, our industry leading relationship with Air France and KLM continues, and we expect to have a very, very strong 2023 with them.
I'm sure in questions and answers we're going to get a lot of questions about how we see European demand shaping up, but I'll give you the teaser on it. We see it very good through the winter and accelerating as we get back into the peak season of spring and summer. Last but not least, Aeroméxico . Not to mention that of these carriers, both LATAM and Aeroméxico had to go through a bankruptcy restructuring because they got little, if no government support.
They're both out. They're both in very strong positions. Aeroméxico now producing consistent profits and very robust. We're hopeful the one thing we have to get to with Aeroméxico is, for those of you who track this, Mexico is a Category 2 country right now, which prohibits expansion between the two countries.
They're meeting this week, we're hoping that those that gets resolved in the first half of this year, and we can go back to a Category 1 and continue to grow that franchise with them. Last but not least, I'm just going to say we were not without challenges in 2022. Ed pointed out to a lot of them, and I want to acknowledge that our European hub partners both had very, very difficult years in terms of getting the staffing right, in terms of getting those models right. We've been working very hard. Alain and the team have been doing a great job, and I think we feel very confident that we will not repeat some of the issues with connecting travel or even local travel in Amsterdam and De Gaulle that we had this past summer.
Great plans in place to improve that moving forward. As we think about our opportunities internationally, I talked about leveraging our partners a little bit, I think the other is, well, how are you going to get your returns up in the international arena in the medium and long term? You know, we've been very honest with you and with ourselves that we have lagged internationally in terms of international returns versus our historical domestic returns. This slide is just illustrative of it. I think, you know, there's a theory, even internally at Delta is that, you know, the next flight that we serve, the next market that we serve, whether or not it's Papeete or whether or not it's, you know, Cape Town, that's going to reverse our fortunes.
The reality is that on the margin, those are a very small percent of our total international marketplace. What we really need to do is to do better in the 95% of the core that was flying in 2019, that's flying today, and that's going to be flying tomorrow. I think when you think about what we've done domestically, and maybe we've been a little bit ahead of this domestically in terms of our investments in domestic fleet renewal or in terms of domestic premium products, now we're really focused on international and the international rebuild and flying the same things and getting better returns. You say, "Well, how do you do that?" Right? How do you do the same thing you did last year and do better on it?
It's really the same theories that we've used domestically, and it's improving premium product revenues. That's really been a highlight of 2022, not only domestically but internationally. What are the key levers that we're going to pull there? That is the full implementation of Delta Premium Select, the upscale coach product.
The returns on those, we're getting fares that are generally double what we get for a regular coach product. If you haven't tried it's a fantastic. If your company or you don't want to spring for the flat bed and the Delta One and it's a really great alternative. You think of where we started back just in 18, your choice was flatbed, direct aisle access, or coach, right?
We weren't really satisfying very well the needs of different customer bases. Now this year we have Basic Economy. Of course, it's similar to what we have domestically and non-refundable, non-changeable, limited bags. We have a Main Cabin, which is the traditional coach. We have Delta Comfort+. We have Delta Premium Select.
This year will be on all transatlantic and all transpacific by the end of the year. Of course, Delta One. Getting better at selling those, improving the selling propositio n, improving the value proposition, getting paid for the premium products, introducing the premium products. I'll tell you these things, I hate to say this because they're flying off the shelf. You know, we don't have to try really hard to sell them. They're selling themselves.
As we continue to bring them and continue to refine our models, get better at the pricing, the relative pricing between those, I think we have incredible upside there. The second is improving the cost structure, right? We got to improve the revenue base. The revenue base is going to get improved by improving the premiums.
We don't see a whole lot of momentum in coach, and that'll be based on supply and demand, but really focusing on premium products, driving the upward momentum in unit revenues, and then having the fleet drive our costs down. By this time next summer, we will have 30%-40% of our capacity in new generation airplanes.
Lower fuel burn, more eco-friendly, much lower carbon emissions, and more premium products on those airplanes, and just generally a significantly lower cost structure similar to what we've done domestically with a slight upgauge. Every time we retire a 767 and replace it with an A330-900, that is many margin points in terms of CASM that we improve.
Last but not least, well, I have two more actually, is our cargo performance. We did a self-assessment, and I think we came to the obvious conclusion that we have historically underperformed in cargo. For long-haul international, this is a key component of profitability. One, we know we're gonna have I think as we close 22, you'll see significant relative improvements. In 23 and beyond, I think we're gonna get even better.
That goes back to the fleet improving as well. One of the reasons we weren't as good of a cargo carrier, and there were many reasons, but not the least, was we had the least cargo capability because the 767 is not a very cargo-capable airplane. Every time we replace them, not only do we get more premium seats, but we get a lot more cargo capability.
The more you have of anything, the better you are at selling it. We have a lot of opportunities we think as we move forward in the cargo space. Last but not least, counter-seasonal flying. I think one of the things that we did that is underappreciated is we did a huge international fleet restructuring during COVID. Coming out, if you think about having 17 triple sevens, which is the number we had pre-COVID, getting rid of subscale fleets that we didn't have a future in.
If you think about how we flew that triple seven fleet, we had one spare. Of the 18 airplanes, we flew 17 of them in the summer. In the winter, we were flying 11 or 12. Having your crew sit home, having your maintenance done in winter, we just weren't getting production and cost structure out of those small fleets. Flushing the small fleets, getting into fleets that we can have scale on, working to create counter-seasonal opportunities. Has anybody in this room been to Papeete? All right. Did you enjoy it? Yes. Okay.
Markets like Papeete that peak in the winter and counterbalancing them with Europe so that we create full year-round airplanes that are much more flexible and can have us drive better asset utilization, not only in the short run but in the long run as well. I've talked a lot about premium products internationally, but this really illustrates the difference in A, where we're growing, how we're growing, and the margin and how we're approaching this. We wanna be America's first-class airline. We wanna be known as the best in class. We work very hard operationally to get there. We work very hard in terms of the amenities that are on the plane. We know we have the best people, but continuing to feed that as we move forward.
If you look since 2009, almost all of our seat growth, and this is a slide that went back to last year, has occurred in the premium product space, which has driven the differential and the improvement in our margins as we move forward and continue down this path. Our, our latest, the latest arrival, even in the narrowbody space, the 737-10, which we have on order for arrival in 2025 and beyond, will have the highest component of, for, premium seats as a percent of total of any fleet. You see us continuing to move down that path, eliminating one-class 50-seat airplanes. Those are the kinds of things that we are continuing to evaluate as we move forward. 15,000 more daily premium seats in 2023 versus 2019. Growth in 2024 continues.
Premium will represent 30% of seats and a higher percentage of our revenue. We'll get to that slide in a minute. People always ask, where do we feel that we are in the middle in terms of the innings, right? Are you at the end? Are you at the beginning? I think we continue to see opportunities.
I think one of the things that is really underappreciated by investors is that these are relatively new products, and the way we've brought them to market is not really best in class yet. If you look at what underpins our premium offerings, it's an infrastructure that has been kind of put together, not really organized for sales or for servicing.
As we think about the integration of how do these products price against each other, how do these products avail themselves in the market, are all your distributors selling them the way you want? We have so many more opportunities to continue to open the aperture and the relative value of the products versus each other, even within Delta. Really excited about what we have coming over the next several years and the opportunities that that presents. A little bit about SkyMiles. Not a little bit because SkyMiles is one of our superpowers. Is that what you're calling it? Superpowers.
That's what the lawyers say.
That's what the lawyers say. one of our superpowers. You know, when Ed was the one who set the $7 billion GOL back in 2017 or 2018. We all looked at each other and thought, "Oh my gosh, how are we gonna get there?" Through a lot of hard work and a lot of value creation, I think that I would be really upset if we missed any of these numbers. I think there's upside to every number in the future on this chart. Really the question that we have to ask ourselves and one that I'd be asking us if I were you, Well, okay, you're gonna make the $7 billion in 2024. What's next?
I think we owe you that is, and we're doing that internally is we're saying, "Okay, how far can we take this?" I think one of the things that I'll point out here is that only 29% of our SkyMiles members hold the card today. That's been our most fertile ground for how we grow the card program is through SkyMiles acquisitions.
One of the reasons we are continuing to get record numbers of SkyMiles through the front door because not only is it great economically, but the more you're engaged with Delta, the higher your NPS scores are. If you're a non-member, you have a score, and then if you have SkyMiles, you have a score that's higher than that.
If you have, all the way up to is if you're a SkyMiles members and a Diamond or and a Medallion with a card, you have the highest NPS score. The more we can engage you, the more we can actually surprise and delight you, please you, and engage you as a customer and have you be a part of our ecosystem.
It's got so many benefits to continue to drive that acquisition for SkyMiles and for the card moving forward. We have a lot of exciting things we'll be talking about in early 2023. When we get to Investor Day in June. See, I gave the month anyway. When we get to Investor Day in June, we'll have a lot more details for you about where we take this next, but I think it's very exciting.
Big things are coming in 2023. Investing in customer value. I think, you know, we've just started scratching the surface on things like small business, where we've gotten incredible traction with American Express. Non-air partnerships. These are things. I was looking out the window here. If you look out the window, it says Delta Fashions.
Well, that's not our next one. We have a lot of things on the travel ribbon. We will sell next year a half a billion dollars of car rentals on the site. All right? A half a billion dollars of car rentals. Sell $1 billion of vacation packages, and continuing to grow those ecosystems. There's a lot more to do here. We talked about our success of our premium loyalty.
We talked about expanding the ancillary businesses, cars, cruises, vacations. Our goal here is to continue on our journey for revenue diversification. I think we laid this out pretty well in last year, and I just wanted to give you the update of where we sit today with 55% of our revenues to be premium products and non-ticket, and by 2023 57%, our goal is 60 plus. When you think about it, this is one that I think continuing to make the airline more premium, we think is resilient not only in good economic times, but in challenged economic times as well.
I think when you think about what we're facing right now with inflation, and we see, you know, where the savings sit, who's planning on traveling more, we see that the premium sector is the one that is the most resilient. That the people who have a lot of wealth in this country plan on continuing to travel next year.
When we look at what our mix is, we have really not that many seats for the lowest end, the commoditized. If we go back to 2019, and we had probably 10%-15% of our seats were sold in Basic Economy. Today, that's less than 5%. Less than 5% sold at the commodity side of the business. Everything else is a value add to that.
Everybody else is selecting something that is not at the bottom end of the spectrum. I think that just demonstrates that we are continuing to move our products and services to be designed for those customers who are willing to pay for something other than just a seat. We do think that through the pandemic, through a recession, through all cycles, all parts of the cycle, that this will be the more resilient. They may pay for it differently, but we're indifferent to that. I think the model that we're creating is that you can get into those premium products many different ways, right? Once you get there, 70% intend to repurchase, so pretty sticky.
Say, you know, you're a little bit strained on your budget, but you've got a bunch of SkyMiles, and you want to get to sit domestically first. Okay, you buy the ticket in coach, and then you use your miles to upgrade. We've created an ecosystem that we think is resilient and that we're indifferent to.
We don't care whether you use your SkyMiles or whether or not you're buying in cash because it's the same transaction to us in terms of the revenue base. Last, I think we've done a great job. This year we had some really big announcements with partners like Starbucks, Instacart, and of course our historic partner Lyft, but continuing to grow our ecosystem.
I think other big brands like Starbucks are seeing value in partnering with Delta and the SkyMiles team for us to drive more revenue to them and for vice versa. I think we're in a very exciting position. We have a lot of upside in this space, and really is about our future years. With that, I'd like to turn it over to my good friend, Dan Janki, to run you through what does that mean to our financials.
Yes.
I didn't get to see his timer, Ed. I think he hit the over. Well, welcome. It's great to be here with you again, a year from when we were last time together. What I wanna do is take you through our financial framework, our progress on that as it relates to our three-year plan. Really wanna focus on three key items. First, cost execution.
Two, the opportunity in front of us as it relates to margin expansion. cash generation, and capital allocation, and being disciplined about reinvesting back in the business, but also driving down towards our leverage goals while enhancing the return on invested capital. Those will be the three primary focus. Let me start with how we're closing out the year.
You know, we're really pleased and proud of how the Delta team is performing here as we close out the year. Ahead of our initial guidance, operating margins of 11%, earnings per share, $1.35 to $1.40. That puts us for the total year, over $3 as the first year of our three-year plan. As Ed talked about, three consecutive quarters of double-digit operating margins and continuing to close that gap to 2019.
It certainly didn't go as we expected and as it came out, but strong results. We lived in an environment of elevated input costs, both as it relates to fuel and non-fuel costs that I'll talk about. Feel like the momentum is building here at Delta. First year of the three-year plan on track, the third year of having EPS greater than $7 per share.
I wanna start with cost. Talk a little bit about where we are, where we're going. As we talked about throughout this year, our non-fuel costs were higher than we anticipated. They're higher than our plan. There are three primary drivers to that. One was the pace of restoration, two, the intensity of the rebuild effort, and then the third one was broad-based inflation.
Let me first start with rebuild. Hired over 25,000 people here. Tremendous amount of resources that consumed. That was effort, both formally and also informally related to that. It also created a lot of inefficiencies. As we talked about on the third quarter earnings call, we're carrying over $1 billion of excess costs in 2022 related to this rebuild and related to those inefficiencies.
The second driver was the pace, and as Ed talked about, we made intentional decisions in the second quarter to slow the pace, intentional investments to protect the operations, ensure that we run it at industry leading, what we expect of ourselves, but more importantly, what our customers expect of us.
That resulted in our capacity being five points lower than we planned. The third one, industry-wide inflation, predominantly in two areas related to our purchased goods and services, more on the service side than on the goods side. Contracted labor was a key driver there. The other one was the reset that we're seeing in the regional industry as it relates to regional cost drivers. Those were the drivers that kept us above plan. Those costs you can see on a comparison basis, 2019 peaked in the summer period.
We run this reliable operational performance, it's allowing us to put in relative capacity restoration. You see the step-up in capacity of being in the low 90s% versus low 80s%. You also then see the benefit that we're getting sequentially as it relates to scale and efficiency here as we close out the year. 2022, the work's not done. It was a heavy lift year.
Took a lot of effort and intensity as we built the capabilities to fully restore with an eye to the summer of 2023. As we get into 2023, it's about a year of growing into that infrastructure that we built and completing the final components of rebuild in the first half of the year. We expect our non-fuel costs to be down 5%-7% on a year-over-year basis.
Certainly, this is predicated just like what Glen took you through as it relates to the commercial strategy, and we're going on running industry-leading operations. That enables both the commercial strategy. It also enables the ability to drive costs and cost efficiency. Cost comes from three categories.
First, the scale and growth. Glen walked through a lot of components of that. I'll also share kinda where we're doing that, how we're doing it, and why it's cost-effective. Second piece is on efficiency. Starting to make progress, but the real marker that we have as we go through the year is to have our operating groups at or near their historical productivity levels as we execute through the back half of the year. The other one is completing the rebuild.
We will have rebuild costs down $350 million year-over-year, 2022-2023. The rebuild that we do have left to do will be substantially completed in the first half of the year. Maybe if I just give you a few examples, give us confidence both in the capacity, but also the drivers of efficiency and the completion of the rebuild.
First, crew resources, pilots. This past year, hired record levels, 2,500. We completed over 6,000 qualification events, both of those at historical levels. As we progress through and into the second quarter, that May time period, those will revert back to historical levels. That allows us to take 1,000 resources out of training and put them into production. There's two things.
One, it gives you the confidence and ability to deliver a fully restored network in the summer. Also, it completes the rebuild and the reduction of those rebuild costs. Another place you can look as it relates to those operating metrics of getting efficiency is where we're putting this capacity. Take our airport operations. They're effectively staffed. On most days, we staff to the peak to ensure operational reliability at the peak.
As we add this capacity in, we're adding it into those, giving it breadth and depth into those morning banks, into those valuable afternoon banks that Glen talks about, both for local traffic and for connecting traffic. That allows our hours per departure to be down mid-teens year-over-year, thus creating those types of efficiencies. That is the drivers of the operating leverage.
Get the scale, you get the efficiency, you get the completion of the rebuild and reduction in rebuild cost. That operating leverage more than offsets the cost that we have in here as it relates to the increase in supplier. We expect another year where we'll take some inflation related to our supply base.
It also anticipates a full year run rate related to the step-up and reset of the regional flying cost. It has our traditional Delta labor escalation in there for our work groups. As Ed pointed out, it does not include the agreement in principle that we have with our pilots. Continuing to make those investments that we talked about last year as it relates to our Sky Clubs, our airports technology, and clean. We certainly know what it takes to deliver this improvement.
We expect to improve in 2023, then again in 2024. This is a little bit about, you know, a lot of this ties into exactly what Glen talked about. It's where do we get that efficient low-cost growth? What are the drivers of it? Part of it is the how. That's the increase in the utilization of assets that we already have in place.
This is getting the utilization out of our fleet. You see it returning close to 2019 levels. We're doing that with greater gauge and fewer departures, making it more cost effective. The other piece of this is where are we rebuilding? Glen went through details as we go through the international piece. That's low cost flying that we're putting in place as we restore that network.
We're also doing it with the next generation aircraft that he talked about. It's competitive advantage versus the current fleet. The third piece of this really ties into the next component, which is the domestic element of this, where over 75% of our growth is going into those competitively advantaged core hubs that are extremely cost efficient, higher margin than the coastals.
Why is that? That's scale, right? High local passenger share. Six out of 10 passengers connecting through that. Those are our lowest cost per employment hubs that we have. Lowest costs in the system and also competitively advantaged versus our peers. The other thing that gives me confidence is almost half of that growth is going into Atlanta. That's our biggest, most profitable hub. Deep operational capability. It's got a deep team and advantage from it.
Not only does this work from a commercial strategy, but it enables the cost and the cost efficiency associated with it. This is what drives the improvement in 2023 year-over-year. With that, we run the business, which you can hear everyone talk about, for margins. We certainly look at the unit revenue, we look at the unit cost, but you always put them back together as it relates to where are we as it relates to margins.
You execute that commercial strategy that Glen talked through, whether it's premium loyalty, where we're putting the growth, how we're putting it in with the operating leverage that we get from scale, efficiency, and the completion of rebuild. That, coupled with the fleet renewal, allows for a three-point step up as it relates to operating margins next year, 10%-12%. Significant.
Additional step up as we go into 2024. This is important here because I think Ed had that slide that showed what has transpired over time. This isn't new to the Delta team. When you look at what the Delta team did from 2009 to 2019, it was foundational to that. Efficient growth, but with efficiency, with expanding margins to the mid-teens, outpacing the industry by 400 basis points. Team's got a track record of it. This is the focus. This is what drives the earnings power and the cash flow of the company. First year, over $3 a share here as we close out the year. On path for the $5-$6 next year, and greater than $7 in 2024.
Certainly, as I talked about, margins is the fuel that drives that earnings growth. Also importantly, it drives cash. That cash is what allows us to not only generate free cash flow, it allows us to invest back in the business, be disciplined about it. We have fleet in the air, on the ground, our ground capital, our airports.
At the same time, continue to drive this journey of deleveraging, strengthening the balance sheet. We expect to end this year at 5x leverage. Next year, we'll be at 3 to 3.5x . Well on our way to where we wanna be, a strong investment grade of 2 to 3x . Maybe a couple points to talk about related to that. One that's not intuitive, but it relates to the pension too over this period of time.
Think about the pension from where it was. You could go back a decade, but you can also go back three years, and you can look at it on a cash funded status. It's just around 90%. Today, it's over 100%. 2019, 2020, if you added that to your debt metrics, you'd be adding in $5 billion-$6 billion of liability.
Today, where we sit, it's zero. Pension adjusted, our leverage number without the pension, 1.7 in 2019. With the pension, 2.3. We'll be within one turn next year of that. We've done that, as Ed talked about. We didn't dilute shareholders during the pandemic. This is again key to disciplined capital allocation, continuing to build a strong balance sheet for the future.
With that, when you do that, you have efficient growth, drive productivity, expand margins, power earnings. Power is cash, right? You grow return on invested capital. All those elements work. That's what we're focused on. I'm excited. You know, I'm confident in the future in regards to where we're going as a company.
It's certainly mindful that the economic environment, we sat here last year, a lot of things ended up happening differently than we expected. I'm sure that will be the case, as Ed and Glen remind me. There's always punches in this business, but we will be nimble, we'll be agile, and adjust to it and continue to deliver for our customers, our employees, and importantly, our shareholders. With that, we're gonna convert the stage here a little bit, I think set up the chairs, and we're gonna go to an active Q&A. Thank you.
All right. Are we managing this by?
We have runners, right?
Yeah. We're gonna run this to 12:15 P.M. I'll have José give you time on the ramp. That's our time. Wasn't me though. Sorry.
I can hear you.
Okay.
Oh, you can now? Well, thanks on a very comprehensive presentation. It's Michael Linenberg here from Deutsche Bank. I have two questions, I guess. First one to Dan. It's great to see that your pension is fully funded. I mean, like you said, a few years ago it was a $5 billion-$6 billion headwind, so you're that much closer to the investment grade metrics that you're aspiring to get to. Is that benefit a function of a step up in the discount rate this year?
Have you yet to do that and as we think about pension expense next year, it seems like almost every asset class has had a negative return unless you're along Brazil or something, or cash. When I think about the returns in your pension, versus that discount rate, like how should we think about pension expense in 2023 and the cash versus non-cash component?
I'd say it's not just about this year as it relates to pension performance. If you put this up 10 years and look at what John and the team have done in regards to how they've managed it and managed the returns over time, along with the company's commitment of putting cash in, because throughout periods leading up to 2009 and during the pandemic, we contributed cash to it. That is really what happened. If you go back and just look at last year, that net liability was just below $2 billion. It's continued improvement. Certainly rates help as it relates to liability side. As it relates to pension expense, pension expense will be up year-over-year. It's a function of the returns in the current year and the asset base.
You snap it once at the end of the year, it will be up between $5 million and $550 million. I remind you that's non-cash, as it relates to that. In the other item, you have interest expense down and others down about $150 million. In that non-op piece, you can expect it to be up about $400 million, and that's in what we've laid out for you.
Okay, great. Then just my second question, to Glen. I think we've had what? About a year and a half now of no change fees. I think now it's both domestic, international. I think maybe it's across your entire network. How do you think that has influenced customer behavior and also the fact that now you're that much more competitive against some of the carriers out there with maybe the lowest fares, but they have still pretty significant change fees. If you can just talk about how things have evolved in that. Thank you.
Well, I think we had to do it in the pandemic, is that, we needed to get confidence back in travel and, you know, with the spikes and the different strains, people needed to feel secure that if they book, that they were not gonna get put in a bad position. I think what we've seen is that we don't wanna be punitive, right? Is that that was one of the genesis. We were on a process to morph them anyway because they had just become punitive. What we wanna do is we wanna give people choices at booking.
Whether or not it's the flex fares that we offer today that are fully refundable on top of just about any fare except for basic that you can buy, or whether or not it's, the products that we sell, that we want to better meet the needs of our customers, and that's our driving force between all these decisions.
As we look, we think that we've been able to make up a good chunk of that. Still it creates churn that is not what we would want ultimately. I think, you know, on the margin, we're looking at things that could slow or prevent churn, but never a change fee again, right? We've crossed that bridge and look at how well we're doing without it. Why put that annoyance back into the purchase path and lack of confidence? It's more now to create things that people wanna buy rather than things that threaten them if they change their mind or wanna make changes.
Great. Thank you.
Hi, good morning, guys. Sheila Kahyaoglu from Jefferies. In terms of, your cost guidance, maybe Dan, for you. In 2021, you gave some buckets that are contributing to the increase in CASM ex, whether that was investments, inflation. How do you think about that breakout with the 10%-12% non-fuel costs and some of the pilot assumptions you have embedded in there?
Well, just to be clear, we said the pilot AIP is not in the cost guidance. When you go back as it relates to CASM, you think about the same elements, right? We think about going from 2022 to 2023, that scale and efficiency, that gives you the vast majority of the driver, right, of the improvement.
That's 11 points of your improvement if you compare it to 19. Somewhat similar on a year-over-year basis. The rounding might be a little bit different. That's all from the scale and efficiency. You get the benefit of your rebuilt, your transition being down 1. That's all that's in that 11 points, right? You have the 4 points going against you, which is what you would expect. It's the element of our Delta specific investments. We're talking about our Airport Sky Clubs technology that we laid out in those buckets. Plus t he inflation and labor escalation, which is the supply base, the regional reset, and then also the component with the nonpilot Delta wage increase escalation in there.
Just on international, as you think about your international playbook, how do you think about what regions and partnerships are contributing most to that and the biggest opportunities?
You want to take that? Clearly, the transatlantic is our largest entity by far. That we're planning on having a very solid summer, I think a lot of questions this morning I got at breakfast were about a recession in Europe. I think for all intents and purposes, we're in the recession in Europe. How bad it gets, I don't know, but we're already there. We've seen that the travel patterns have held up well during off-peak and advanced bookings for peak summer travel, which are 80% U.S.-based anyway. The winter is the one that's more European. If we make it through the winter as we see, which is a positive in terms of our total capacity, positive in terms of our unit revenue, I think that sets up really well for our summer peak.
Thanks. It's Scott Group from Wolfe. Dan, you said that the pilots excluded from CASM. I thought, Ed, you said that it was included in earnings.
Just to be clear, we're not gonna discuss pilots now.
Yeah. Okay. Got it.
I'm gonna head off your question.
Okay.
What I'll clarify is I said in the big earning, the guidepost in our margin, in our EPS, in our leverage ratios, it embeds the assumption that the pilot contract is approved. We've not drilled that into revenue. We've not drilled that into the cost lines, we just want to be clear on that.
Okay.
Yeah.
That helps. Just one more clarification then, Dan. The pension, Ed, when you just talked about, that's below the line. That would not be impacted in, back in CASM, right?
Yes. It's below operating margin.
Okay.
Above pre-tax. Yep.
Okay. You had a slide showing the path for international to go from high singles towards, I guess, teens margins. What's the timeline to get there, and how much of that do you get in the 2024 margin, 2023 and 2024 margin?
Yeah. I think we should be fully there by 2025. It's between now and the end of 2024.
Okay.
Yep.
Hi. Hi, Brandon Oglenski from Barclays. Thanks for doing this today. You know, yes, I think called out real GDP being flat in 2023. Obviously, LAP being, you know, Omicron in the first quarter. Revenue up quite a bit. I guess how conservative of an assumption is that on a demand outlook? I guess what is the tolerance if margins or demand doesn't hit plan?
What are some levers that you can pull? You know, I asked one of your competitors the same question. It seems like the industry is very focused right now on rebuilding, getting back to where they were. What do you do if the economic forecast doesn't come to fruition?
Let me start there. Glen and Dan, you can jump in if you want. Listen, I think GDP is a bit anyone's guess. I can also tell you that this is a company that's just come through a pandemic. We are very sensitive to, you know, the economic outlook here, and we have a lot of levers that we're willing to play.
You know, the capacity you have in here, I do describe as aspirational. It's assuming we hit the core economic, you know, underlying growth that we're assuming even in a flattish environment. To the extent we're not seeing it, you know, we're not gonna bring it back. We're gonna adjust it. We're gonna do different things with the assets.
I think we have a lot of levers in that. You know, your question really to me is more of the strength, you know, the revenue strength. That's why I spent the time at the start of the presentation looking at. We think there is sustainable macro trends impacting our industry that are going to be greater than any one individual airline's initiatives or plans. It's gonna continue to supply a lot of growth. I think that unmet demand is gonna stay around for quite an extended period of time.
I guess as a quick follow-up, you know, things that have changed since the last time we were doing this a year ago, interest rates are up quite a bit. How does that change your capital allocation strategy? CapEx staying about the same. Obviously, you guys didn't come with an $11 billion plan, can you talk about, you know, the need for replacement versus, you know, higher interest rates?
I can start. We, you know, listen, we're not gonna comment on some other competitor's CapEx.
Yeah.
you know, we don't throw moonshots out there. We don't do once in a generation. You know, we see other airlines do that occasionally. We've been very disciplined about doing it on an annualized basis, and we're always looking out relative to our order book three to five years out. We buy aircraft all the time.
You know, we don't wait. We always wanna maintain the flexibility and the agility because we do have a volatile industry in which we operate in and subject to a lot of different economic forces. Could we flex down that CapEx? Yeah. We could on the margin, absolutely. We're really, you know, wanting to make certain that, you know, we're in good shape to catch the demand that we have confidence in.
A lot of that CapEx is gonna be not growth, it's gonna be replacement. By definition, it's gonna have a lot of efficiency even in an economic downturn. We're pretty much looking at three to five years. We're always looking at three to five years. You know, we'll have, you know, OEMs are always interested in getting Delta business.
We're funding that with the operating cash flow.
Yep.
We're paying cash for these assets. While over this period of time of 2023 and 2024, we're also deleveraging not only with the normal maturities, but also chipping away at reducing the debt.
Hey, Savanthi Syth from Raymond James. Could you talk a little bit about the MRO side of things, just what you're seeing from third party and even just on Delta, the, you know, the things that you need to do for your fleet and your kind of confidence in kinda keeping reliability and getting the fleet that you need, given the supply chain issues we've been seeing?
Yeah, I certainly do. You know, we're fortunate. One is we have a great team at Tech Ops and a really deep team, both on the operating side, but also on the technical side, the engineering groups. We work really closely with the OEMs, both the airframers, the engine makers, and the component makers.
Certainly, there are constraints in the system. Every day it is changing as it relates to what part, what material, whereabouts it is. Our team's done a better job about getting out in front of it. I still remember at the beginning of 2022, we were with one of the engine makers. We started talking about if we could give them longer forecasts related to material in regards to then they could get aligned.
The teams have been systematically doing that with our own so that they get better transparency to our demand, and then we're able to manage it. The real focus has been ensuring that we can take care of the Delta's needs and that we're lined up for that. We continue to do that on the MRO side, where our customers are. We're coming off a base where we're not yet back to where we were on the business, and part of that is because we're really busy at Delta, with the full amount of aircraft that we've done and the induction into service and the repair of our own fleet and ensuring that we can fully restore.
It's certainly one of the businesses that we didn't slow down. We maintained what we had, but we didn't push investment 'cause we needed to take care of our own. There was labor shortage and obviously the labor pushed towards the Delta side, make sure we took care of our own needs. It'll be a topic we'll discuss in June.
Yeah.
'Cause I think to me, it's still a $5 billion external, you know, additional revenue source. Today, it's around $1 billion.
Yeah.
I see, you know, massive growth opportunities over the remainder of this decade in that business. We've got all of the deals in place.
Decisions. That's the important part.
We got the pipeline of orders in place. Now it's just up for us to kinda get the focus on the management team and the resources to go execute.
If I might ask, though, just ask on the regional side, and Glen, you mentioned some of the kinda changes that you're making. Curious what the changes you're making kinda near term versus maybe as this kinda gets resolved, what you might return to, like what that component within Delta looks like. Just curious if in the cost guide, if you're assuming in 2023, like, a full pass-through to your regional partners, or is that something that kinda continues to go up as contracts come up and they get renewed?
You have a couple of questions there.
Yeah.
The first thing is, you know, we've experienced a dramatic increase in the labor rates at the regional carriers in 2022, that was in hopes of stabilizing the supply. I don't know the exact impact on that, but it's gonna take a while for that to really flow through. That's why we're not counting on it coming back until 2024. I guess the question that you have is As I said, we'll exit our commitment on flying our own 50-seat regional jets by the summer. We may have some prorates, but if they wanna prorate with us, they're gonna have to have two- classes of service on that airplane.
We will be out of the 50-seat business, so that's about 50 to 100 airplanes that we had in 2019 that will not be coming back. We have a 325 limit on the two-class RJs with our pilots, and we haven't made total commitments on how many of those we intend to fly. Clearly, with the escalation of costs there, the number is going to be biased towards smaller as this comes back, not larger. That wasn't one of our big pilot negotiations, twoas could we have more two-class RJs. That's kind of something that we've passed in terms of the importance of them in the total network. I think, you know, we were first in de-emphasizing, Ed.
When Ed came back to Delta, we had 500 50-seat regional jets in the network, 550.
Yeah.
That's been a long transition, and I think we're ahead of the curve, and we need to stay ahead of that curve.
The cost guide does have what we believe is the full reset of those costs. Won't comment on whether it's a full pass-through, our team's, I think, completed all the. It's what our view is today. For those changes in rates, we've also made sure that we have the flexibility as it relates to being able to sit down aircraft related to those agreements, so that we can keep driving the utilization over time.
Hey, good morning. Jamie Baker with JPMorgan. Two for Glen. First you cited some corporate survey work that suggests a healthy step-up in the first quarter. What sort of businesses does that skew towards? I only ask because the headlines coming out of the tech sector are, you know, grim at best.
Right.
Speaking for the investment banks, you know, probably not much better.
Right. well, the ones that it's skewing towards are the consultant firms, and they've been, of course, one of our biggest users. They essentially were not traveling in 2022, and they're looking forward to traveling in 2023, as well as financial services.
Yeah.
Which, while you may be shrinking your total workforce, I think if you look at your work calendar next year, you're probably gonna travel more than you did this year. I think what you have to think of in terms of the more macro thesis is that New York is gonna get better. I think one of the great things about coming and seeing you all again this year versus last year is the streets are a lot more lively this year than they were last year. I think we're all feeling a sense of confidence. New York has been a laggard in terms of return, and seeing New York take that next leg up is really one of the key drivers. Really excited about those numbers we're seeing back from across all spectrums.
If I could add, just supplement Glen's. It's the professional service firms, not just the consultancies.
Yeah.
One of the big factors that we are seeing is that people are returning to office more frequently and with longer duration. It's what's inspiring the professional service firms to get out, because they can't go visit clients if they're not in their office. There's a pretty significant move we've seen over the balance of this year in terms of people starting to get back to office for various reasons. That's driving the law firms, it's driving the consultants, driving the accountants and all the professional service providers. I think that's got a nice leg to go there.
Second, it's a bit of a follow-up to Savanthi's question. On the regional front, given the upheaval there, what we're seeing with rates, cessation of service to smaller communities, keep hearing that the A319 is the new RJ. How does this play out, Glen, at the industry level? Does this create more opportunity for Delta, or do the returns accrue to your discount competitors? Thanks.
You know, I think we are uniquely positioned with the A220 fleet as well as the 717 fleet. If you look at what we've done in a market like Asheville, because we have larger local markets and we're in big city hubs, we're able to upgauge those frequencies and sustain forward momentum. Asheville, for example, used to be served seven or eight times a day on 2 class RJs, now served six times a day on 717s. Revenue's up, margin's up, relative positioning is up. I think there's opportunities in here. It's not without its challenges for every airline. I'm not gonna speak to them, I'm gonna speak to us. You know, it clearly does have its challenges, but it also has its opportunities.
As you know, Jamie, the A220 and the 717s are unique assets only Delta has amongst the majors.
Yeah, we have.
We have.
We've got 65 flying. On the 717s, we've got the ability to flex up from there.
We're, we're going up to.
For another 15. Yeah.
Up to 80 and, you know, up to 100 A220s.
Yep.
Small aircraft through the window in the lab, correct?
Exactly.
Yes. Yep.
It's a little technical.
Hey, hey, good morning. Duane Pfennigwerth, Evercore ISI. Thanks for, thanks for hosting today. Ed, just to follow up on a comment you made earlier and Jamie's question on corporate. It was the first I'd heard you. It felt like a hedge, but maybe you could just expand on it a little bit. We never expected corporate to come back all the way. We're at 80%.
Clearly, there's some constructive commentary about, you know, early 2023 that it can continue to grind higher. Was that a statement that we don't need it to get to 100% to hit your financial targets? Or has there been some rethinking, you know, learning along the way to make you think that we can't get back to Again, all your GDP slides, GDP is bigger than 2019. Not really sure why corporate at some point wouldn't be, you know, well north of 2019 as well.
I think it could be, Duane, it wasn't a hedge as much as that's the. We're still learning as we go. We're prepared for it not to come back to a classic business return pattern. By the way, we don't need it to come back because a lot of those people are on our planes doing different things, you know, traveling more through mobility as compared to on their classic business patterns.
They're living in different cities and different regions of the country. They're traveling into offices for the first time as compared to living in a city. I think it's something we're continuing to learn. I don't think that the pattern of 2019 for corporate travel is going to look like what we're seeing into the future.
Like everything else, I think there's gonna be an over-rotation for a while. There, for some period of time in the next couple of years, people are pushing out. In a recessionary environment, what's the first thing that gets chopped? Is corporate travel, because it's easy, it's discretionary. This is not a recession where you can do that. This is a recession you have to grow your top line because they already have the cost out of the. That incremental reduction of travel spend, it's not gonna matter relative to getting back out with your customers.
Could I add one comment to that? Is that I think the differential between the high demand leisure, high yield leisure and business has converged over time. The trade downs aren't as pronounced as they were historically, which I think is a great, shock absorber for us.
Thanks. That's helpful. My follow-up is just on the refinery. I know there's been kind of an on again, off again over the years. My guess is this summer in June and July, you might have sent Richard a thank you note on having a refinery. It looked like a really good thing to have. I just wonder what's the future? How do you think about it? Is this something that you're gonna look to kinda simplify over time?
Well, we've said over time that, you know, we would be interested in a strategic partner at the refinery, given the pretty significant capital, you know, requirements, that we are looking at. You know, this year we're gonna make $700 million-$800 million net cash at the refinery. That funds, you know, the CapEx for some period of time, takes a little bit of that pressure off of it in the interim. We'll continue to manage it. You know, it's a valuable asset that in this environment with high fuel prices, high cracks particularly, as, you know, was really the environment which we bought it 10 years ago. It was for that environment.
Thank you.
It's Helane Becker with Cowen. Just a question on the growth that you're planning to do at the hubs. Are the facilities able to keep up with you? Are there enough airport personnel, provided by the airports themselves, infrastructure, you know, runway issues? Are you able, maybe parse out what percent is restoration and what percent is actually growth?
Sure. I think all of them, it's restoration.
Yeah.
I think if you take Atlanta, which is our largest hub, in the summer of 2019, we were running just under 1.1 million seats a week through the hub. As we look at this summer schedule, we're running probably just at best right around 1 million seats. The facility is sized for something much larger, and we're doing it on fewer departures because the gauge is way up, so the runways are not constrained. Do we have the personnel in the airports to do it? Absolutely. Because we're filling in the valleys, not the peaks or in the very beginning and end of the day are the anchors, and then the time throughout the day are the times we'll be filling out. That, I think not only is it more efficient throughput for us, it's more efficient throughput for the airports. Not the airports, but TSA is really the.
Yeah.
CBP are the. I think we have a very solid plan for that. At none of the hubs are we running seats that are above our peak summer of 2019. We're below at all the major hubs except Salt Lake, which is different because they have all the new gates.
All the growth.
A lot of bigger gauge.
Don't forget that these hubs are major profit centers for these communities, these cities. They want to invest in the resources locally to help us grow. It's good for all the way around.
Okay. Then just as a follow-up question. Ed, I heard you this morning talk about, return of capital, and you were not planning on doing that. You said in the last earnings call too, I think, that the GOL is to pay down debt and reduce leverage. Is there a point at some point in the next maybe year to 18 months where the board says, "You know, we've accomplished our goals, and at this point, let's revisit a dividend or share repurchase program?
We will revisit it at some point. You know, we're not ready to revisit it currently. Certainly not share repurchase is, you know, until we get back to that investment grade like a debt structure. Even then, it'll be a question as to whether that's good enough to start a share repurchase. Dividend's a little different.
You know, it's smaller. It's a little more manageable. In the near term, I would not count it. We'll talk with our board at every meeting, you know, the topic comes up. Until we get a better fix on the business, until we hit those 2024 and have confidence on those 2024 goals, I think that's a luxury to come.
Great. Thank you.
Hey, good morning, guys. Up here in the front. David Vernon from Bernstein. Glen, I wanna ask you a question about the revenue outlook for 2023. You laid out some pretty exciting things like the growth of the core hubs being at a higher RASM, the growth of premium coming in, the card program performing pretty well. If you look at the guide, you've got ASMs growing faster than unit revenues.
Can you talk about some of the thinking behind what went into the construction of the guide, the puts and the takes, trying to figure out, you know, how do we think about this as being a conservative outlook or a not so conservative outlook? It would seem like there's enough stuff going on in there from a premium standpoint and everything else where it might be a little bit better.
Right. I think the quarter, again, we know the most about is the first quarter. We're very optimistic versus last year or versus 2019 that will continue to show forward momentum. I think in the back half of the year, it's really related to fuel price and fuel price recapture, that the forward curves are significantly lower. You know, we had a big fuel price spike last year. You know, fuel is a great unknown. I'll pass it over to Dan here because it's really that's the big driver is what is fuel gonna be in this year. The industry's had a pretty effective recapture on fuel. I think that's what's driving our.
Yeah. That is it.
O ur unit revenues down is really that fuel is a multi-billion dollar good guy.
All right. Maybe just as a quick follow-up. You know, 2022 to 2023, the 300 basis points of margin expansion utilizing the assets you hired ahead of demand, I think I get that. 2023 to 2024, same rate of margin expansion. What are the levers that you guys are expecting to pull? It would seem like 2022 to 2023, just given the fact that, you know, you're staffed for 2019 flying and are way below, would be a little bit easier than maybe going 2023 to 2024 with an additional 300 basis points. If you could just kinda talk about high level, what's embedded in your thinking there.
You know, just think about, you know, these years are points in time.
Yeah.
Right? We're continuing to make progress every quarter as we push forward. Let's talk about 2023. 2023, first quarter of 2023 is gonna be real easy to comp versus first quarter of 2022 with Omicron. You know, Glen's talking about revenue, but, you know, that was you know, the real question on revenue is gonna come in the summer when you're starting to comp, you know, a more, much more robust picture.
The same thing's on the cost side. As you continue to push forward, every quarter we should get healthier as we go. Operations, the demand picture, the durability of that. There'll be some ins and outs on fuel, and there'll be some ins and outs in terms of where the overall capacity comes versus supply.
Our assumption is that there's gonna be some pretty strong revenue demand as we measure. That's not gonna be, you know, kind of a one and done, you know, kinda, okay, check. The pandemic is behind us now. We get back into some normal travel behaviors. I think it's gonna continue to stay strong.
I think the capacity growth in here is, you know, probably the best we could do. If they say if it was over under, I'd say we might come in a little less on that, and that's gonna continue to be a push for 2024. I think international is a big contributor to going from 2023 to 2024. International is still not up really. It's just starting in Asia. Turning on LATAM is gonna be a big contributor. We're just starting that physically now. These things all have lead time and they take time. I think those are some of the things, you know, David. Don't forget also profit sharing is a difference. You know, we'll have a higher profit sharing-
Yeah
P ayment next year.
I'm sure.
V ersus this year, you gotta kind of calibrate for that, adjust for that. Those are some of the factors. The single biggest one is also that pension.
Yeah.
Half a billion dollars non-cash. Versus 2022 that we're having to cover in that. You put that all together, and obviously we feel a lot better about 2023 than 2024. We haven't done the 2024 detail plan, but we see the momentum continuing to push through the year.
Thanks. That's helpful.
Hey, everyone. Conor Cunningham at Melius. Hi. Glen, hi. Just on the core hub versus coastal hub strategy into 2023. I totally get why you would be like restoring all the capacity in the core markets. That makes sense. But it's hard, you know, you show a difference in profitability at core versus coastal.
I would imagine longer term, you wanna make the coastal hubs more profitable than what they are now. Do you need to restore the core markets before you can get back to focusing on coastal hubs again? Is there an international component on itineraries that maybe there's a long tailwind there that could be a nice move for you?
Right. I think that, you know, one of the key reasons we love the coastal hubs is they tend to be in the biggest international markets.
Mm-hmm.
Having that as the platform for further international growth in out years is going to be really key. If you think about our hub networks and how they structure for Europe, for example, having Boston and New York and Atlanta on the East Coast is a really strong portfolio of U.S. origin. Similarly, Seattle and Los Angeles on the West Coast are quite important as well. Those are really long-term things that we said we wanna preserve our opportunity. Yes, our aspirations are to continue to improve margins there and continue to ensure presence there. It's just a priority of when you do it, right?
Yeah.
This year, the priority in coming out of the pandemic in 2022 was in the coastal gateways to make sure that we preserve that platform for future growth. This year is about restoring the coastal hubs and really into 2024, 'cause if you think about it, at 101% restoration of ASMs and 98% restoration of seats, which is what we showed you today, with the coastals being fully restored over 100%, that means we still haven't gotten the interior hubs back to full restoration throughout 2022. We have a little more work as we head into 2024 with that, then we can go back to a more balanced approach of how we indifferently assign the next airplane into the network.
Okay, that's helpful. There's some talk about pilots. I get that you guys don't wanna talk about that's fine. On the other employees, though, you know, you're not unionized there. You know, there are other airlines are going through contract negotiations as well, there's likely another step up on that side. Can you just talk about any headwind to the cost structure that that may have on 2023? Is it included already? Maybe just the benefit of being able to talk direct to your employee base relative to some of the other airlines as well.
Yeah. One of the advantages of being non-union is that we have full flexibility in terms of keeping our employees, our non-unionized employees top of their profession. In each category, whether it's a flight attendant, mechanics.
Yeah.
Airport agents, technologists, you name it, they are at the top of their scale. We've maintained it and actually have grown that over the course of the last few years. So we're not facing step-ups. They're actually trying to catch Delta, the other guys, versus what we are. We have embedded in the plan another increase in the first early part of the new year that we think will be a meaningful but also.
Yeah.
Important investment in our people. It's not just scale. You know, you saw what we did earlier this year about boarding pay with our flight attendants. It's huge. It was a good cost investment in our people, but it also drove a whole lot of reliability on the plane.
Yeah.
You know, gave us an opportunity to manage the operations better. You know, I always tell people that the most important job I have is to take care of our people. You know, that's what we do, and it's why we have the best service. We have the best performance. We have the best rewards. We have the best profit sharing. The model works really well.
Thank you.
Hey, good morning. Dan McKenzie here, from Seaport Global. Couple questions. You know, Ed, your remark that international demand is really where U.S. demand was in, I think you said March or April. The question on the international side, just given the revenue leverage opportunities on the corporate side.
I'm wondering if corporate demand, if it's 80% recovered at the system, back of my mind, I'm thinking maybe it's only 50% recovered on the international side. I'm just wondering if you can elaborate a little bit more on the corporate long haul and how that's, you know, expected to perform in 2023. Related to that is LATAM. We know how the JVs have worked to Europe. LATAM is kind of a newer opportunity. How do we think about Latin America?
Is that growth opportunity really a GDP opportunity, or is there a chance or an opportunity to expand the network on that entity?
Glen?
Well, I'll start with your last question first. I think it's a little of both, is, I'll take Santiago, which is our, linchpin. LATAM is headquartered in Santiago. We upgraded. We historically flew a 767 from Atlanta to Santiago, and I'd say it wasn't one of our best performers. Now with the LATAM agreement, with LATAM supporting us, and this is the early days, we upgraded that initially to an A350, and the A350 is producing better returns already than
The 767 did in arrears. I think those are the kinds of opportunities and, you know, using the LATAM presence for the South Florida market, which they serve almost all the markets to South Florida, using Atlanta as the connection point to the interiors of the U.S. for LATAM customers. I think there's a lot of upside for us, it'll be a combination.
A few new flights, a lot of gauge, really working on improving our margins together. I think there's a lot of upside for both carriers. On the second question is, listen, different geographies are in different stages. I'd say Europe's the furthest along in terms of corporate recovery, followed by Latin's been a recent trend, that's still evolving. Last, the Pacific, with Japan just opening and China still closed.
You know, a little bit of everything in the international arena.
Very good. Second question is for Dan. The $700 million-$800 million on Trainer is a really big number. You know, it's something we haven't really talked about, you know, for a long time. Is this an entity that where the return on invested capital is simply tied to the crack spread, and are the returns sustainable in this particular operation? Or is the value in this really more strategic, the ability to negotiate so that if you don't earn a return on invested capital, you still, you know, it still makes you, sort of a stronger from a supply chain perspective?
Well, certainly it's gotta earn its keep on its own, right? In this environment, it is extremely profitable and exactly why both on availability but also on margin. I mean, there was times where even the New York Harbor market was tight from supply, and we had certainty for our. The other piece I would say, though, is I think by having it at least coming in and serving over the last 18 months, I think we're better at fuel management because of it. Our team, the floor, they came out of running airports. They've actually run pipelines. They've been a part of refineries. They've been in the oil and gas industry.
A big part of our fuel is to self-supply out of Trainer into the Northeast, but we also about another 30%, we self-supply through the management in getting it actually physically to the airport. The teams do a great job with that. I do think that gives us a position because of the expertise that we've built over time of people rotating through and working more deeply as it relates to that industry.
Thank you.
Thanks. Christopher Stathoulopoulos, Susquehanna International Group. Dan, on slide 27, the unit cost drivers on the operating leverage piece. Just if you could give a little bit more detail on two of those three items. On the efficiency side, if you could talk to how we should think about utilization or block hours per day, and really if that's gonna be second half weighted for next year. On the low-cost capacity growth, is that really just adding seats or inventory into your core domestic hubs, or is that coming from someplace else?
Yeah. As it relates to the low-cost growth, that's the incremental capacity that we talked about. It's both international and domestic coming in related to that. The efficiency. I'm sorry, I missed the part of your question on the efficiency.
Just If you could help frame how we should think about utilization?
Oh, utilization.
Whether it's block hours per day or how you measure that and whether that's a second half weighted sort of outcome. Thanks.
Yeah. Well, no, I think we have the you see it in the that utilization slide that we put up as it relates to the aircraft, right? Closing the gap to 2019 as we go 5%, that's as we put the capacity. Certainly that gets the benefit of the summer where we're fully utilizing the fleet. It also talks to the components that Glen talked about how we're using the aircraft throughout the year and deploying them into other markets that's increasing that. We're getting that benefit as it relates to the mainline operation.
Thank you. A follow-up question. Glen, I think this was a follow-on to Scott's question on the international markets. You said that you expect to be there by 2025, which is a pretty significant step up from where we are today. If you could help, how much of that is coming from, gauge or order book or just a different configuration, and how much of that is just the unlocking and re-recovery in your international partners? Thank you.
Yeah. I don't really know that we have an exact recovery. I'd say if you looked at the two key drivers, which are efficiency of the airplanes themselves, so gauge driving lower unit cost as well as the premium products, it's pretty evenly split between the two, right? The premium products which, for example, the Delta Premium Select, which is not even 1 full year into the marketplace.
The maturation of that and getting that out and it's available for sale, as well as having a higher component of Delta One and Delta Comfort+ seats, that's really one key driver. The other is the fleet efficiency, which comes in over time between now and 25. We're not done at 25, right? Is that we wanna take this beyond. Right now we're looking to 25, and that's what we see between now and then. I think, you know, there's more upside beyond that.
Good morning. Stephen Trent from Citi. Thank you very much for taking my question. I had a question on loyalty. You know, from what I can see, you guys have been such a good counterparty for Amex, and maybe it also goes somewhat the other way. You know, do you sort of reach a point, sort of medium or longer term in the program where maybe you go back to them and there's wiggle room to negotiate, you know, better economics? I mean, I'm sure you already have a good view on that, but just curious.
We are always working together collaboratively, there's always points of, I wouldn't call them negotiations. We're not negotiating the big umbrella contract, but there's individual initiatives and opportunities for them to invest deeper, for us to invest deeper. You know, this is a living, breathing partnership that is the most valuable partnership we have. It's the most valuable partnership they have. It gets my attention. It gets Squeri's attention. It gets our leadership team, Dwight.
Glen, it runs it through the operations. We're all incented to continue to grow it. I think Glen said on the presentation while the contract that we designed back in 2017, I think, 2018, in that timeframe that we signed it, had a $7 billion target in five years, whatever those numbers are. That's not the stop. I mean, that was just another checkpoint. We see continued growth, certainly, as our companies become even more valuable to each other. Even more integrated. Oh, super.
Very helpful. Just a quick follow-up, kind of a follow-up to Dan's question earlier. When we think about the LATAM side, and the opportunity for non-ticket revenue, I think I heard one of you gentlemen say $500 million from Rent-A-Car. Could we see maybe some expansion of these opportunities, for instance, as an eventual joint business agreement spools up with LATAM?
Sure. I think with all of our partners, I think it's all a matter of priority, right? I think what's great about the loyalty space is we see a lot of opportunities, and it's our ability to execute. Clearly, executing with partners is more difficult than executing on your own. I think, you know, when you look at what we need to do over the next couple of years, that probably isn't about going to market with LATAM or any of our partners, but that's another thing in our journey.
Our journey has a long runway. The more we can bring our partnerships together over time, the more powerful we'll be together. Those are our tenets, and I think it's just really a matter of, well, there's a natural bandwidth to everything, and what you don't wanna do is deprioritize, so you get unfocused.
Hey, Christine McGarvey, Morgan Stanley. Ed, earlier in the presentation, you noted some industry kind of aspirational growth, which is well noted that there are some external supply constraints going. How do you think about that transitioning to more internal discipline in terms of kind of capacity growth as we go forward, rather than just external kind of supply constraints for the industry?
I think the most important governor that we will have, speaking for our company as compared to the industry, but I think the industry largely feels the same way, is making certain that we don't overshoot our capabilities. We all saw what happened this spring when we saw a massive demand bow wave. We didn't have revenue in two years. We all ran anything we could fly or operate, and it wasn't a good outcome. We pulled up quickly, others pulled up quickly. I think, as I say, I think the system where we stand today, again, speaking for Delta, again, I think it's not different to the others, we're a bit fragile. You know, We manage it every weekend.
We're kinda making certain that the cancellation rate is low or below low, and what the pilot availability is, the flight attendant availability is, the maintenance availability is, and it's going to continue to stay that way for some period of time. That's why I describe the overall industry numbers you're hearing, larger numbers, including from Delta, by the way, are a little bit more aspirational, assuming everything goes well.
We don't live in a world where everything goes well. Things will happen and move around. It's, it's making certain that the experience set of our employees continues to gain, that we get through the pilot training, you know, continues, that continues to move efficiently. That, you know, we have the assets of that. We own all the means of production.
We own the aircraft, we own the people, we own the technology. This is still probably another year before we can, hopefully by the end of next year, say, "Okay, I have confidence in what we're gonna produce in 2024 or 2025." I don't have as much confidence in 2023, you know, we gave you our perspective of what it could be.
Yeah. Thank you.
Any additional questions?
Any other questions? Glen, wait.
Thanks. I appreciate the opportunity and the overtime. Specifically on the international JVs and international investments, I'm wondering if that's in the free cash flow or in the CapEx guidance out over this time horizon. If you could just comment on, you know, what level of investment you'd expect to make over 2023 and 2024 in international partnerships and if that's, you know, included here.
I think we're largely there. We don't have any new partnerships contemplated. We've been able to get through the restructurings and the reinvestment at a lower level in these partnerships. I don't think there is a remaining number. I think we're good to go on that front. Now we turn all of our attention to how we turn that into real value. I mean, I think the other thing Glen was just talking about, the opportunities internationally. Don't forget the landscape internationally is also different.
Yeah.
The competitive intensity of a marketplace four years ago is very different than what it is today. I think that's gonna benefit us and our JVs as well.
Since I have the mic, you may take a pass at this one. Just with respect to, you know, cost and capacity next year, any high level views on, you know, first half, second half, how much of that, you know, full year CASM guidance is sort of back half weighted?
Well, I think as I say, you know, we're, we don't look at the calendar as kind of a point in time. It gets better. It gets better. As we go through the course of the calendar, the CASM, the cost guidance gets better. You know, the back half of the year, we start to have a little more capacity in place. The revenue guide, you know, in terms of unit revenue, you know, brings down or takes, we take it down a couple notches because of that to balance the capacity growing in. When you put them together, you know, I think the second half of the year is gonna be a stronger margin performance than the first half of the year.
We give you a kind of a full year, but two different halves to the year.
Thank you.
Great.
Just one last one on margins, if you don't mind, Glen. Given the international opportunity is about 1,000 basis points relative to domestic margins, how do you think about that opportunity? Is it more focused on RASMs or CASMs, and are there regions where the competitive dynamics just don't allow that?
No, I think it's half and half, right?
It's both. Yeah.
Half comes from the fleet, and half comes from the premium revenue side.
Yeah.
Fleet is CASM, and it also is RASM because you have more premium products. RASM is selling the greater number of premium seats that you have in the marketplace.
Hi, David Vernon up at the front again. A question for you, Dan, on the non-aircraft CapEx outlook for the next two years. Glenn, we were talking a little bit this morning about the money that you put into the different airports within the system. You know, are there additional big buckets of CapEx that you need to spend on the airport side? If maybe you could talk a little bit about how the return on that investment's been paying off and how you're thinking about, you know, what is the new LaGuardia terminal? What impact is that actually having on your financial performance? To kind of relate that for us, that'd be great.
Well, we're getting through the final stages here. We still have CapEx related to the airports as we complete LAX and LaGuardia in there and the work that we're doing with the. Okay, we're also then making investments in Sky Clubs and other facilities. These are long-term. These are certainly generational in nature.
The opportunity that's in front of us, both LaGuardia and LAX and Salt Lake City and the other ones, you're gonna see the growth, but you're gonna see the growth over time, right? You can talk about what we're thinking about for LaGuardia and each of those. Outside of that airport piece, the other place we're investing is continuing to invest in ground capital. The electrification of our ground capital. We're on track for 50% of that in 2024. Continue to just chip away at that, modernizing that as it relates to it. A continued commitment around technology and the backbone of our infrastructure, but also delivering better products for our employees, but also for, and more importantly, for our customers.
On the airport side, specifically, Dave, we're basically done. You know, not done, but we've got the big numbers behind us as LaGuardia finishes, as LA finishes this year, as JFK, you know, should be pretty much finished by the end of next year. The real value in that is that the ability for us to manage the projects, manage the construction. We went fast.
At other times, others went slow during this pandemic to get these projects done because we had control of the project, and that's gonna save us in the long term an enormous amount of value that others will be subject to rate increases by the various municipalities that we've now got locked down in depreciation. Having moved faster, and we've got a fixed cost base at a much lower rate that we can leverage.
I think that return decision is gonna pay off multiple ways over the next decade.
Could I just finish with one thought?
Mm-hmm.
These are 40-year assets, so you know, the next LaGuardia will be built after I'm gone.
We'll invite you back for the groundbreaking.
Invite me back for the teardown of LaGuardia. Being a 40-year asset, you don't build it for day 1.
Yeah.
You build it for growth. The highest CPE is the day it comes online, and then over the 40 years, the CPE comes down. What I'd like to point out is that the highest CPEs are in the 23 numbers, and this only gets better over time.
Time.
as we continue to build back into the size of the facility that we built.
Thank you.
We have time for one final question. Conor.
Conor, shape it so he puts this on the.
Yeah.
Somewhere.
Keeping you here longer. Just on distribution in general. You talked a little bit about it, but just, you know, how has that evolved in the pandemic? Is there a GOL that you wanna be able to sell a certain amount of seats direct, and start to now push out?
We have no GOL per se. Is that, you know, we wanna meet people where they want to buy us in the channel they want to buy us, but with the best products and services. To the extent that a distributor is not presenting our products and services the way we need them to, we continue to work with them to improve those displays so that customers get a full array. We think that the array that we have on our direct distribution is how we'd like those products to be displayed and talked about, to the customer base. We've got a lot of adoption in process, whether or not it's here today, but whether or not it's Expedia, whether or not it's any of the other online distributors.
Whether or not it's the retailers through travel agencies that need and want better displays from their online distributors. We're working with that whole ecosystem, and I think when we say that we're in the middle innings of improving product distribution, part of that is not only improving Delta but also improving the other retailers as we move forward.
Thank you.
All right,
Okay, you want me to wrap up? I'll wrap it up really quickly because we're already way over time. Apologies for that. Thank you for being here. Hopefully, you got a good perspective of all the different moving forces, factors, opportunities, challenges, as we move forward. Hopefully, you've picked up from on us a real sense of optimism, of renewed confidence in the business.
Having our hands more firmly on the dials of this business than we were over the last several years. Hopefully, it's a marked difference from, you know, a year ago's presentation to now. It was a great year for our company to be able to hit all of our core targets in the midst of unprecedented uncertainty and challenge and operational disruption.
I think this thing's gonna continue to do very well. The demand environment stays strong. Hopefully, you get a sense for the macro, why we think that's gonna stay in place operationally. You know, the cost opportunities as we bring scale back. As Glen rightfully points out, as the airports start to mature, and we continue to grow into them, are gonna be good opportunities for us well.
The international landscape is to come. You know, there's a lot of international out into the future in the next several years. We hope you all come visit us in June in Atlanta when we take you through some of the, really the incredible excitement that we have going around on the consumer experience. We're gonna be back on stage.
We're back on the main stage of CES first week in January. I'm back there, and it'll be great opportunities to talk about our customer and our technology and where we're going. You know, next year is there's just a lot of excitement in the pipeline at Delta. For us to be able to deliver those opportunities and, you know, double the earnings power of this franchise in 12 months, it's gonna be a big year for us, but I've got a lot of optimism for it. Thank you for being with us, and hope you all have a good holiday. Thank you.