Barry, just want to, you know, while we get the results from this question, just want to thank you for coming down, joining us at this conference. I think a great question to lead off here because there's been so much volatility in airlines in the past, you know, two years, especially post-pandemic. If we were to rewind history and, you know, pre-pandemic, say, "Hey, coming out of this, the high-cost network airlines are gonna have the highest profitability. The low-cost growth-oriented carriers are gonna struggle with profitability," I wouldn't have expected that. I don't think anyone would have expected that. For better or worse, some of your larger competitors have kinda called the demise or the doom of the low-cost model. They've even named it some other acronyms that we won't even bring up here.
I guess, what do you say to the idea that, you know, low cost, high growth can't work anymore?
Look, I think, you know, it's great that the legacy carriers have done well. I think, you know, $5,000 fares across the Atlantic have covered a lot of sins. And I think if you look at their competitive capacity, it tells a story. I mean, it's the opposite of what happened to the LCCs and the ULCCs. If you look at Florida and Vegas, right? That's where all the capacity has gone. So if you would ask me pre-pandemic, "Hey, why would this change?" Well, the reason is there was this huge bomb went off called COVID, and it upset the apple cart, and then when everybody ramped back up, we all chased the same place.
I mean, it would be no different than opening a Costco, a Walmart, a Sam's Club, and a Target all on the same block. That's what happened. And so when Nordstrom is left to itself in Cleveland or Cincinnati, don't tell me that they're not gonna do better. But we have been actively going and saying, "Okay, well, I'm gonna put my Costco in Cincinnati. I'm gonna go put a Costco in Cleveland." And so I think we're making the changes that we've got to do to, you know, make sure that we get back to our pre-pandemic margins.
I appreciate that response, Barry, and I want to keep this really focused on the long term, but, you know, can you talk about spring break travel trends? There has been, you know, a little bit of a buzz at the conference here that domestic travel may be a little bit better than expectations in the first quarter. Is there any veracity to this?
Yeah, I think. Well, look, I don't know. I've only been around, like, 28 or 29 years in this space, so I don't have a complete history. But Easter moving a week is gonna improve it, so I don't know how much is that. So you get a point or two from that. But look, I think the demand is fantastic. I mean, look at this conference. I mean, how many people were here? The... Go to the streets. I mean, last night, we couldn't even get a reservation until 8:30 P.M. I mean, so... And that was a Tuesday, right? So I think, yeah, the demand's solid.
I think there were a lot of fears last year, right, about people losing their jobs and, you know, the student loan repayment and those kind of fears, and I think a lot of that has subsided. Even though we've had layoffs, what seems to be happening is there's still a robust enough economy that they're finding jobs relatively quickly. So I think that's given consumers a little more comfort, if you will, and we know they still have plenty of money, and we know that incomes are still up. I'm not surprised that demand is so strong.
When you gave annual guidance to returning to pre-tax profits this year, following a little bit of a loss in the first quarter-
Well, to be fair, we made money last year.
Correct. Sorry. But returning to or getting to a better pre-tax-
Yes, on our return to double-digit margins. Yeah.
Yes. Can you talk about some of the network changes that you guys are making, and especially because your first quarter capacity growth, I think, is high single digits, but you're gonna step up to double digit levels for the full year. So what's your confidence like going into a higher growth second and third quarter, that the margins are gonna come back?
Well, I think it's just simply that we're unraveling. I think. Let's go back in time for a moment, to last spring. So in Q2, I know that this doesn't fit the LMA code, but we made almost 10% in Q2, and so we were back on a really good track. We flipped in Q3 to -5%, which was a 10-point drop year-over-year. So what happened was there was a glut of capacity that came into Florida and Vegas, but mainly Florida, and it was significant. I mean, we had over half our airline in Florida, and it just really punished us.
And so what we saw, you know, we had routes like Philly, Orlando, where we went from 4-5 trips, but the industry added even more, and we actually had less revenue. And so I wouldn't look at the growth as much as... And so when we've got places that we had incremental capacity that gave no more revenue, that's what we're redeploying. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry about the growth. I, I can guarantee you that, that we're finding much better homes for this capacity, and so we feel very good about it. And in fact, this is below the growth rate we've been doing for several years now.
Well, can you talk about some of those network changes? Where is the capacity? So places like Orlando and Vegas is where you're sourcing from. Is that correct?
Sure. So we're growing in general, so we're gonna grow 12%-15% this year, but we're also redeploying about 10%-15%, depending upon the month. So we're moving it out of Orlando, we're moving it out of Vegas, we're moving it out of all parts of Florida, for the most part, and we're moving it into Cincinnati, we're moving it into Dallas, we're moving it into Philadelphia, we're moving it into Cleveland, we're moving it in, you know, to other places that are generally high fare, underserved markets. And so we're seeing a really good response there. And you know, you look at industry fares that are $500-$700 round trip on routes that in many cases are half the distance we fly in and out of Florida.
Pretty good trades for us.
Literally taking a flight that didn't add incremental revenue, putting it into a market where you can get better fare structure. Is that correct?
Absolutely. Absolutely. And the average fares that we're chasing in these new markets are on average, 15%-20% higher than the places they're coming from. So we're actually saving consumers a lot of money as well.
I mean, does the price stimulation still work in this model, though?
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it just doesn't work in a place like Philly or Orlando, where we'd already been for close to 10 years. We'd already had low fares, and, and I think us and other competitors, like I said, just put too much capacity there. We literally opened a Costco, Sam's Club, Walmart, and a Target all on the same block.
Got it. On the cost side, you guys announced a pretty ambitious plan to save $200 million by the end of this year. Is that correct?
Yeah, that's right.
Can you talk about, you know, with your strategy of having crew bases across the country, how that's gonna impact those outcomes?
Yeah. So, a couple of big buckets of that. Half of it's roughly coming from the crew side, so, which is mainly hotel savings, and then you get some crew efficiencies as well. So that's roughly half of it. And then on the other side, you get reliability, which, I mean, if you go back to last summer, I mean, we had to cancel almost 3% of our flights with all the challenges we had. And so that's just straight... I mean, you had the costs, and you didn't have the ASMs. So fixing that is huge, and then that also unlocks utilization. So that's kind of the other half, so.
Are you seeing those benefits today, or what's coming with the new crew bases this year?
So we're starting to see the benefits, it's on the horizon. We, you know, we got down to as low as a third of our flights were out and back last July. By March, we'll be at 68%, out and back. So, we are seeing the efficiencies in there. We're seeing, already we've had several—we had a snowstorm, and there was actually, I don't know if you remember, a few weeks ago, there was all the flooding. There's actually another round of flooding now in California. But there was flooding, and then there was a storm that hit Denver and a lot of the Rockies. That weekend, we didn't have any cancellations, and if you look at the other two big carriers in Denver, they had a lot of cancellations.
So, I think the beginnings of this are looking pretty good to us.
Okay.
And by the way, we're second place in completion year to date.
If you had to look back last year, what, what were the sources of problems with the completion factor?
Look, the multi-day trips are just a challenge, right? I mean, so when you start getting these ground delay programs that we're getting, they're more often, and they're longer than we've ever seen. I mean, to give you an idea, I mean, in July alone, we were up 1,000% more ground delay minutes in the system than we had in 2019, in July. So these are, these are big ground delay programs.
Well, and how does this strategy help you mitigate that now going forward?
Yeah. So by being out and back , what that enables us is, we're not gonna stop that weather event, or we're not gonna stop that Ground Delay Program that's maybe caused by general aviation traffic or whatever the source is. We may still have to cancel that flight, but we're not gonna cancel five more over the next day or two because of the knock-on effect, because that now displaced a plane or displaced a crew. I mean, to give you an idea, last summer, we had... So we do a lot of near-term planning, and we'll plan today for tomorrow night's maintenance. We had, on some days, as many as 40% of the aircraft ending up in the wrong cities, just simply in an 18-hour span, just because of what had happened in all these Ground Delay Programs.
So that's gonna stop that because the plane goes out and back, or if you have to cancel it, it's in the right place. So I'm not gonna be chasing airplanes around with parts and mechanics to get them fixed. So which is huge.
I suspect when it's out of station, then you are going into off-contract pricing on maintenance or?
Oh, absolutely. I mean, to give you an idea, we were doing even on a planned basis, I mean, so we were doing a service check in Islip, right? And we just had one there. It's $1,200 bucks to do a service check with this firm that was there. We can, we now are gonna move that into a base, and we can do it for, like, $200-$300 bucks. So yes, it's very expensive to use the, these small amounts of maintenance, and by concentrating our maintenance, we're gonna save a lot of money on that because we'll have less mechanics per plane, and you actually need less parts, too, because we got them more concentrated.
Well, I think, you know, a lot of the airline stocks trade at deep value multiples, we could argue. But I think part of the challenge with a lot of investors here is that, and it's more an industry issue, but the things that we supposedly can't control, like cost and labor inflation, those have been going pretty high for the industry post-pandemic. I know you guys have an open labor contract with your pilots right now. How do you expect to manage what most likely will be higher wages for your pilot workforce?
Yeah, so look, we put out our guide, including labor costs, and we said that it'd be about a quarter of a penny. I think I would point to this year and last year. So if I start with 2023, we widened our cost advantage from 2019 to 2023, from 39% to 41%. So I know there's a story about cost convergence, but let's not let facts get in the way. We actually raised the cost advantage. Now, if I look at this year, we have noticed across the industry, you know, probably what? High single digits, CASM increases, is that fair?
Mid to high, sure.
Mid to high. Okay. Well, we announced that we're gonna be 1-3 down on a stage-adjusted basis. So I'll spot you the answer. Giving $0.0025 in labor increases for next year is less than the difference that we're seeing this year. So I think we can comfortably get to a point in the next year or so, with new agreements and continue to maintain our cost advantage.
I mean, fundamentally, you do have lower unit costs compared to some of your competitors.
lowest in the space.
What do you think is driving this idea that costs are all gonna converge?
I don't know. It was a story I know that some people have invented, but it just hasn't come true. I mean, look, at the end of the day, I think it's... You've got a lot of people that are not managing their costs well, and they're going up high. And you've got people like us, that we are just hell-bent on having the lowest cost, and this is why we have gone to the out and back. We're always thinking of what is the next generation of things that we're gonna do. I mean, we're not talking about it a lot, but I'll bring it up today. We are moving to ground loading front and rear boarding.
Later this year, we'll open a facility in Denver, and we're gonna have out and back flying, but we're gonna be doing it also with front and rear boarding. This has a dramatic impact on your turn times. I mean, we spend close to an hour turning an A321 with 240 seats. If you go to Europe and you see the same aircraft, they can turn that airplane in 30 minutes. That's the next evolution of how we're gonna further lower costs; we're gonna get more and more ground time out of the system. If you do that 5x a day, that's 2.5 hours, right?
So, I'm just telling you this because we are constantly figuring out what's gonna be the next generation and the next evolution of things that we're gonna do to, to not ensure that we stay the lowest cost, but that the, that the cost advantage continues to widen.
Well, I appreciate that response. If there's any audience... There is one here. Let me get the mic. And, Barry, while they're running the mic, and maybe I can segue into this, because some of your competitors say, "Look, travel's become differentiated. People wanna pay up for premium economy or a different cabin, and that's the way the market's moving. So it's not good to be on the bottom end with only a low-cost product." How do you respond to that?
Well, so look, one of the things we've done recently is we've had a Stretch product, which is actually a Premium Economy product. The challenge is we didn't use a name that's common in the vernacular, and Premium Economy is kind of one, that name. So we recently, as an example, changed the name of our Stretch to Premium Economy, and we've spent a lot of time promoting it, and we've seen pretty good results. I think we're also too... You've seen everyone bragging about frequent flyer. We went through last year and actually did a very serious exercise and analyzed every airline credit card. We analyzed every hotel credit card. We did all the bank-offered ones, the Capital Ones, the Chase cards, and all that.
We're fortunate we have a partner with Barclays, with the Barclays card. So we did two things. We said: Okay, if you fly an airline and you earn on the airline, and you have our credit card, and let's say you spend at least $10,000 a year on a credit card, we geared it so you will earn more free travel on Frontier with the Barclays card than any other card in the US. Full stop. Consumers can earn more free travel by spending $10,000. So by making the changes that we did to the program itself and made it revenue-based and how we geared it, we have seen a 20% jump in penetration.
So on board the aircraft, even though we're growing, we've actually grown our frequent flyer penetration by 20% on board versus same, same, months last year in January and the first part of February. And on the credit card side, we were up. We announced this before, but we were up double digit in spend. And Barclaycard has told us that, that we were the only program that was up, not just, not just up, but up double digits. So we think the changes are really good. We're really excited about what that's gonna do. So yes, we have seen people's propensity to spend more, and, we're doing everything to get our fair share of it.
I think we had a question over here.
Yes. Just a question on growth. So, you know, you're focused on having the lowest unit cost you can. You know, you're driving a lot of capacity growth in the market in the second half of the year. I guess my question is, in the context of, you know, if we have a weaker revenue environment or, you know, clearly the revenue environment has been soft for some period of time, how do you think about the lever of capacity as it relates to managing yields as we look out over time? Meaning, you know, at a certain point, does it make more sense to slow capacity growth? I know you have an order book, but planes are in strong demand. Why not slow that capacity growth and get your margins back where you'd like them to be?
Yeah, sure. I absolutely agree. You know, capacity is the answer to yields, and I think if you have to look no further than what's happened in Florida, and it's dramatically depressed the yields. Congratulations, all of you probably paid less than you should have to come to this meeting. But that is the issue. And so I think we have the luxury of seeing a very specific acute issue. And so when I look at the rest of the United States, the other two-thirds of the marketplace, you have the opposite dynamic. You have, in many cases, actually less capacity than you had in 2019. So I think there's...
With a carrier of our size, I mean, for us to grow 10%, I mean, it's 20 bps on the, on the nation. So I think we can continue to grow. We don't see a major thing that would impact that. And history shows that carriers like us and the lowest cost always win when if you have an economic downturn. I mean, there's never been a time. I mean, Southwest in the eighties and nineties, the Great Recession, the only airline that made money in the United States in 2009 was Spirit Airlines. We weren't a ULCC then, but the. I'm just telling you that, that, if that happens, there will be a huge flocking.
You may see some of the attractiveness of some of the premium products go down, but you'll see a big jump towards us.
Barry, what else can you talk about on the commercial side? I think you even introduced a BizFare product.
Yeah, we did. We did. We actually just announced it a couple of weeks ago. So, look, we're doing several things this year. We've got to focus on Premium Economy. We've got the frequent flyer changes that we've talked about. And we have a new website coming out in the second half this year. We've got a new app coming out second half this year. We've actually gonna launch in D.C. the second half this year. So we got a lot of things coming on the distribution that will help demand, but we also have products like BizFare. And what we've had...
I think it's 'cause we've now gotten big enough that way I think we have enough scope and scale, but we have kept having corporations come to us and say, "Hey, we use a TMC, we use a managed travel provider, and all I can buy is your basic fare. I can't buy anything else, or it's very clunky to do. Is there a way to get this done?" And so what we did is we just bundled things together. It's a bundled fare, and it offers a really low price that you get a seat assignment, including Premium Economy, if it's available. You get a free bag, and you get free change fees. And so it's kind of that everything for one low price, and it's available through the GDS. Since we've announced it, we've had massive inquiries about it.
Huge, huge, huge interest. It's only available so far in a long sell, if you're familiar. So this is someone, a travel agent actually booking it, which is only, like, a couple of % of the market. When we get into an automated configuration, which is in the next few weeks, we expect to see big demand. But I gotta tell you, based on the inbound inquiries from corporations, I think this is gonna be a pretty, pretty popular product.
Interesting. What about on the ancillary side?
So, look, I mean, we have been ancillary leaders, and but I think what we've had to do this year to focus on the new web and the new distribution capabilities, we've kinda had to take a lot of those technology resources and push them towards that. But I think the benefit that we're gonna see in conversion and overall revenue, I think in the near term, is probably the right economic decision. So, nothing huge on the ancillary just yet, but once we have that new platform, should enable more things.
Okay. I think this might be a little bit more controversial because some of the folks that look at your cost structure would say, "Well, there's sale-leaseback gains on the aircraft portfolio that you have with a pretty big order book with Airbus." You guys negotiated that pretty favorable pricing. So when you do a sale-leaseback on a delivery, you do book a gain that comes through the P&L, on the bottom line.
That, that's the accounting.
Well, some carriers would put that below the line, so how do you talk to the idea that maybe we shouldn't be capitalizing that as earnings?
Well, so let's make clear that everybody understands the accounting. Some have put it below the line, and the reason for that, it has to be regular and recurring, right? So it's routine and recurring. So the reason why people have excluded it is because it's not... Maybe they don't do sale-leaseback s, or maybe they don't have any planes coming in, and it's not regular and recurring, right? So that's why they've excluded it. So not to give everybody an accounting lesson, but call your accountant and figure it out. And that's why self-serving individuals and, you know, people that are trying to talk us down have invented this narrative. It's just laughable, right? The bottom line is that we are hell-bent to have the lowest costs, and we do that by buying right. I don't think we overpay for anything.
We have buying power with the Indigo portfolio, bigger than Southwest, bigger than Ryanair, any other big carrier in the world. So we buy things cheap. I don't care if it's tires, brakes, airplanes, engines. I don't care. I bet you a dollar that if we're not the best price, we're pretty close. We also do really good on financing aircraft. Same thing, we are out there. I mean, I'm actually going on a road trip next week to meet with some of the top leasing companies, and I'm working on stuff a year and a half out all the time. So we pay less than other people for airplanes, just like everything else. The accounting calls this out, shows it as a sale-leaseback gain.
But what you need to think about is this is a serious advantage to our company, it's a serious cost advantage, and it's an embedded asset. So when you roll that up, you can do the math. I mean, can't get into what the contracts will do for things, but with the fleet order we have and the gains we get, it's well over $1 billion. That's coming. It's real cash, it's real earnings, it, it will hit our P&L. I actually find this really intriguing because Southwest Airlines, 'cause I've been in this business a long time, and I've studied their, their public filings and their breakdowns and everything else, and theirs manifests itself in a really low ownership cost. So it's just hidden in their margin.
No one ever called out. I don't ever remember anybody saying, "Oh, you know, we should take a third of their profits, and we should just exclude the fact that they buy airplanes really cheap from Boeing." I don't remember anybody ever saying that. Look, this is a core part of our business, it's a real advantage, and it's a major asset. And so I love it that these short sellers are pushing these narratives. I love that some competitors are pushing that because they're jealous of it, but the bottom line is, I'm glad they brought this up because this is a major benefit to Frontier.
Well, can you talk to us about not to get too nitpicky on the most recent quarter, but you did have a gain from extending a couple of leases, I think, on the older A320s. Can you explain what happened there?
Yeah, so look, I mean, when you go to return an aircraft to the leasing company, they ask for, sometimes they ask for them almost in mint condition. And so satisfying those conditions are very expensive. So, back to this is actually the accounting, and it's real expense. We were going to incur expenses to do those lease returns, and sometimes the intervals of that expense doesn't really line up with the lease return. And so we've been opportunistically looking at certain leases and saying what's more optimal. So the fact is, it wasn't some accounting trick or anything. It was less costs that we're gonna incur, and so we just eliminated the cost, so.
... Appreciate that. I guess maybe a bigger picture question around that item: Does maintenance liability become an issue at the end of lease for a lot of these aircraft in the fleet?
Well, we're constantly always trying to figure this out, right? So, you need to try to time your... And you can't always do this, but you need to try to time your aircraft engine and your airframe maintenance to, like, line up with a lease return. So if you were already going to do it anyway, that's beneficial. When they don't line up, this can be expensive. I mean, you don't want to have to pay for green time on something that you're not going to realize the benefit. So, I think one of the challenges right now, when you take some of the LEAP engines we've had, for example, they had a lot of early shop visits. I mean, we're seeing this with the GTF, right?
So it may mess up those intervals. So we're actively looking right now, like, and trying to anticipate 8, 10, 12 years out. What's going to happen with our utilization, and where do these things fall so that you can optimize those lease return costs?
Okay. And we only have a few more minutes. Can we queue up, question number four, please, for the audience? In your opinion, what should Frontier do with excess cash? Bolt-on M&A, larger M&A, share repurchase dividends, debt paydown, or internal investment?
What's your guess?
I'm guessing internal investment. All right. Question number five, please.
Oh, I don't have any debt, so I guess...
In your opinion, on what multiple of 2024 earnings should Frontier Group trade? Appreciate all the responses.
This is post-tax, I assume? True net income.
Yeah. And then question number six, please. What do you see as the most significant share price headwind facing Frontier? Core growth, margin performance, capital deployment, or execution in strategy? Barry, we only have a couple more minutes here.
Sure.
I want to come back to the cost issue because I, I feel like maybe we didn't hash that out fully. But you did say maybe $0.0025 on CASM from higher potential labor rates. Is that right?
Sure.
I think, you know, folks are just worried about the sticker shock, like, you know, pilot wages going up 20, 30% with new contracts. Can you talk to some of the offsets that are going to be available to you with the new, new deal?
Yeah, sure. So, so, look, I mean, we're going to have to pay competitive wages, and that kind of gets you in that 20%-30% range. But we've also got to have competitive work rules. I mean, we have some real outliers in our contracts that I think are not conducive, especially with the expectations today of reliability and completions. I mean, and so I think, you know, while there's the headwind of the total cost, we've got some productivity opportunities, and I think they're very reasonable. And given, they're kind of not available in any other contract out there, we feel pretty solid that we should be able to have a conversation about it. The flight attendants are not as—I mean, that will just be a straight wage increase.
I don't think there's quite as many opportunities there, but it's obviously a smaller pool of costs.
As we close here, Barry, I guess at the end of the day, though, you still see your cost base remain the lowest in the industry, still the ability to stimulate traffic.
Uh-
So you're not going away?
We are not going away. We will have the lowest cost, and our cost advantage will continue to stay there or widen, as we have seen, so.
Barry, thank you very much for coming down. Appreciate you being here.
No, thanks for having us, Brandon.