Pleased to welcome Frontier Airlines back to our stage. Is this about your third or fourth time joining us at the conference?
I think so, something like that.
Something like that. So let's kick it off. So I do have to start with some demand questions because today has been a mixed bag of demand messaging from the various airlines. Southwest cited some close-in weakness when they guided down, and my first interpretation of that headline was, "Well, this might not be good for Frontier. This might not be good for Spirit if they're seeing something." Since that time, they've acknowledged that they think they just kind of overshot with their guide. Airlines that do skew a little bit more premium have had very good things to say about demand in the first quarter. You did not issue an update unless it just came out and I missed it, which would be embarrassing, but not the end of the world. How should we think about how the quarter is progressing from a demand standpoint?
We did not do an update. You are correct. Maybe we just got lucky and guessed better.
Not everybody did.
No, I think we maybe guessed better and got a better forecast out and guide. But no, we continue to see actually really good demand. And again, I think it's oftentimes versus sometimes versus what your internal expectations were. But in our case, no, we've continued to see really great demand. And in fact, with the changes we've made in our network, April is looking really good, which is surprising given the Easter shift. But no, we feel pretty good about the world.
Okay. We gave you props in the last quarters write- up for the operational integrity. Run through some of the ingredients that allowed you to really, I don't want to say turn operations around because I wouldn't accuse you of running a bad operation, but all of the metrics really seemed to crush it. I, for one, was pleasantly surprised by how you and the team pulled it off.
Yeah, so we improved a lot. I think if you just go third quarter to fourth quarter last year, but even this year, Frontier for the first two months, year to date through February, is number one in completion. So not a place we've been for a while. So what has caused that? And I think it's we've talked about this a lot, but it's the out-and-back nature of what we've done to scheduling the airline. So we were, call it, 37%-38% last summer out-and-back, and then said another way, 62% multi-day trips. With today's ATC, that just became impossible, especially with high utilization. And so we have moved now. We are roughly not quite 70% this month, and we'll be over 85% by summer. And so what that's done is it's enabled us just to run much more reliably.
Having said that, this last Saturday, we had a very difficult situation across the industry. I know there's a lot of talk today. I think there's going to be a conversation tomorrow. Folks are demanding a meeting with the FAA. So hopefully, we see some improvement there. I think we need to understand what their staffing is. Are they staffing up on the weekends? I know they're shorthanded, but are they how many are they staffed on a Tuesday versus how many do you have on a Saturday, right, when you know that Saturdays with spring break are going to be higher demand? And then we've still got to figure out this general aviation issue. I think that it's just not right for somebody to cancel a 200-person flight so that three people can go Teterboro to Palm Beach.
For those in the audience that are flying that, sorry, but we shouldn't have to cancel a flight for that. And so they need to figure out a fair way to use the airspace. But no, we're really proud of what Frontier's done, and I think we've kind of unlocked the best you can do from a high utilization and good reliability.
So you and I had dinner, I guess, two years ago, and the topic, well, yeah. We've had a fair number of meals together, but one of the things that we discussed, the pilot shortage, was front and center at the time. The regionals were just getting decimated. It was still at the point that they were bearing the brunt.
Yeah, two years ago, that was really tough. Yeah.
Yeah. One of the things that I think you and I agreed on was that possibly Southwest would benefit from that. Trust me, the question gets back to Frontier. I haven't seen that play out given some of Southwest's other challenges. The reason I wanted to talk to you about this, if you saw American's Investor Day deck from last week, there were aspects of it that reminded me of the Frontier plan. They concede that some of the major markets are significantly overserved. They're trying to make a pivot more into the heartland, more into smaller communities. Now, in many cases, they're going to use regional jets, so they wouldn't come up against you. I'm left wondering if their plan in any way influences how you've been thinking about redeploying Frontier capacity into smaller underserved markets.
So look, let's back up. But I wouldn't say that it's smaller, but underserved is probably the right category because there's some that are big that are underserved. Look, I think it's funny now because there was this whole narrative last year that the legacies have figured out how to beat low cost, and I'm laughing, I'm sorry, because it's just the facts just didn't support it. What happened is that the low cost beat the low cost, right? We opened a Sam's Club, a Target, a Costco, and a Walmart all in the same block in Florida. And at the end of the day, you want to know where you don't make money. Well, you don't make money where Frontier, Spirit, JetBlue, and Southwest are all on the route and the capacity's up 100% versus 2019. That's where you don't make money.
It's not when you're flying between Philadelphia and Indianapolis and us and one legacy carrier. Those things go well. So I think that is really misunderstood. And I think if you think about when we say underserved and overpriced, we're looking at the rest of the United States, which is two-thirds of the United States, is not Florida and Vegas, right, maybe 70%. And so if you look at the capacity, it's up well over 20% in those places and the oversupplied, and in some cases, it's even down. Now, they are small. Some are small. But the main thing they have in common is they're just not Florida and Vegas. And so there are small, medium, large markets all over the United States, and even some near international that fall in that category.
We happen to have chosen to grow in Cleveland, Cincinnati, a little bit of Philadelphia, a little bit of Chicago, and San Juan, but we did not touch the Seattles, the Nashvilles, the Indys, the Baltimores. So yeah, I think Americans are probably right. They're seeing the same things as us, but I don't know that we're chasing the same things. It's a big market, and we're tiny. So I don't think that we're overlapping with them in terms of specific places. Overlapping strategy, yes. Overlapping specific routes, no.
I won't push back on your view that much of the discount or pain was self-inflicted from a capacity standpoint, but you still lack the loyalty heft, the premium heft, the international heft. So what are the levers that you intend to pull on? I mean, you've got a guide out there for next year that is consistent with the best of the best and franchises that are already profitable, which you are not. So what are the levers?
No, no, no. We made a profit last year.
I was thinking about the quarter, but yes. Duly noted, yes. So what are the levers that you pull in the absence of that business model diversification that gives you the confidence of producing mid-teens type margins?
Well, first of all, pre-COVID, we were the industry leaders, depending upon the year, but we were always one, two, or three in margins. What's changed? Well, for a while, our costs actually were higher on a relative basis. Well, we had lost some of our advantage.
Some of it, yeah.
On a relative basis. That was almost entirely due to low utilization. We had taken a bunch of aircraft, and we weren't flying them. So that has reversed. We talked about it one of the first things, talking about utilization and reliability. We have addressed that, and that is why if you look at 2023, our cost advantage has now widened versus 2019. And if you look at our guide this year versus the industry, it looks like another 5%-7% potential widening, which, by the way, you didn't ask about it, but more than covers any potential new labor deals. So just their inflation this year.
I was getting to it, but you.
But even that alone would cover people say, "Oh, your guide for next year doesn't include labor." It's like, "Yeah, but I'm going to get on a relative basis even more advantage than that this year versus the industry." So that's the cost. So the cost advantage is coming back, and it's widening. And so now, the revenue is not performing. So on a relative basis, our RASM is down, along with the rest of the low cost, and it is that simple. I mean, we all chased. We don't collude. I mean, this is the best example of we don't collude because if we had colluded, we wouldn't have all chased the same markets. But we did pile on top of each other. And at the end of the day, capacity in my markets was up. Industry capacity was up over 20%.
Cite any of your margin leaders and tell me what their industry capacity was up last year. It was flat to down. So if those reversed, tell me what you think the margins would have been. That alone would fix it. But we're not stopping there. So we're making the pivots, but we also have more diversification and probably more tailwinds than anybody else in the space. We have made major changes to our frequent flyer. We've now seen the penetration go up over 30% in terms of people on board year-over-year in February. So huge, by the way, we made those changes in November. So huge benefit in frequent flyer penetration. Also, with the credit card, we've made major changes to the credit card as well, giving you elite status once you spend $3,000, which gives you free bags, free seats, free change fees.
And so we've seen spend on the credit card jump double-digit as well. Huge things on the frequent flyer side. I know we're still not. I can't get you to Dubai, but we have our own space, and loyalty is jumping. We've also introduced and started pushing our premium economy as well. Today we launched our UpFront Plus.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, so UpFront Plus, if you're familiar with European business class like a Lufthansa, effectively, they block the middle seat. It's a European style. We actually tried this. We've been wanting to do this for a long time, and we tried it during COVID. We got a lot of pushback. I don't know if you remember that little incident. People thought we were profiting on COVID, even though you.
Now that you mention it.
Even though you could go buy a first-class seat on other people that were giving the same space, but we got accused. So we pulled it back. We thought it had been enough time. So we are reintroducing it. I'll let you know in a few hours if we made some sales, but we just launched that a few hours ago. So we got the UpFront, and we have clear delineation now. So we have UpFront Plus. We have a premium economy and so forth. And so you have a lot of different options. So I think that's going to give a good revenue boost. And then we launched our BizFare just a couple of weeks ago, which gives you a low price that includes a bag, a seat, and free change fees, free cancel. And it's all available through third-party and GDS systems.
So no, so we probably have more revenue diversification tailwinds on top of probably the most aggressive pivot on the capacity side. So look, I think the whole industry is going to do well, and I think this whole paradigm that legacies, if they do well, that low cost can't or vice versa, I think that's actually I think that's just wrong. I think you're headed to everyone, and we're going to finally get the capacity kind of normalized back out. And so that unevenness was causing unevenness in margins. So I think everybody can make money. But I do think on a relative basis, because of all the tailwinds and the aggressive steps we've taken, on a relative basis, we're going to probably crush everybody else on a margin.
So on the capacity topic, some of us in the room were at the ISTAT conference last week, and John Heimlich of the A4A did a presentation and drew some gasps from the audience. It's a really good presentation, by the way, John, if you're listening. Otherwise, folks, you should go to the A4A website. But one of the slides that he put up that drew some gasps from the audience was each U.S. airline's capacity plan. And you had year-over-year, JetBlue and Spirit downsizing a little bit. You had kind of low mid-single digits, Southwest much lower than the bar that you would have thought, and then bam, there was the Frontier number that dwarfed every other capacity year-over-year measure on that slide.
Walk me through why that is the right profit-maximizing amount of growth for building on what you were just saying about margins. Why is that the number that allows you to maximize profits for shareholders?
Well, mid-teens growth is what we were doing and had been doing for 7 years prior to COVID and been producing industry-leading margins. We obviously had to shrink during COVID, and we kept taking airplanes. What was bad was when we were growing 25%-35%, it was just a lot of capacity. And so I'm talking about the oversupply in Florida, but we're kind of leaving out the probably 3-5-point drag of just really high growth for a couple of years back to back. But what I would say is I think we often get hung up, and it's not your fault, but across the industry, we'll show percentage growth and not look at the total seats. I mean, there are carriers that grow more than my entire size each year, and it doesn't look like much.
But 12%-15% on top of only 2%, right? I mean, this is less than 0.5% of the industry. But if you're 20% growing 10%, that's 2% on the industry. That is massive. And so I think that gets I think people get hung up on these percentages. When you're small, these are not big nominal impacts on the system.
That's a fair point. When United came out with its United Next plan, which was a growth-oriented plan, I think the calculation we did was that every 17 months, they were adding the equivalent of an additional Spirit or something like maybe it was every 24 months. But when you put it in those terms, it was still just single-digit % growth, but it was quite a bit of capacity. So on the topic of M&A for a moment, when JetBlue's ambitions became known and that merger was pursued, one of the things that I said at the time was that Frontier stood to inherit the keys to the low-cost carrier kingdom, which I then heard you repeat here and there, quoting and referencing J.P. Morgan.
I think I gave you credit.
Oh, no, you absolutely did, Barry. But I'm wondering if you still envision yourself doing so even without M&A, given some of these structural challenges that your largest discount competitor is facing.
Look, and I'm not asking you to throw Spirit under the bus, but I mean, the situation there is tense.
Okay, sure.
Look, I get it. I wish them well. I was there a long time. When you asked how many times I've been on the stage, I think I was actually the first time I was ever on the stage, actually in Spirit.
I think that's the biggest Frontier.
No, I agree, actually. But no, I mean, full disclosure, I think about those folks a lot on a personal level, and I wish.
You're the architect of the Big Front Seat.
I guess so. A couple of things, I guess. But no, I wish them well. So I think that I think they've got a problem, and we have a problem. I think some other low-cost carriers have some problems. Look, I think the best way to stop losing money is stop doing crap that loses money, right? When we look at our business, the places that we were losing money were the places that there were three or four discount carriers all on the same route and where the capacity was up 50%-150% versus 2019. By the way, markets that were already stimulated Philly/Orlando was already stimulated. We've been there damn near 10 years, right? It didn't need another, I don't know, 50% more capacity or whatever the number ended up being. Look, I think we've been doing our self-help.
They're doing theirs, right? I mean, I've seen them maybe not at the scale that we have. They have been, in their defense, a little bit busy until recently. And so I think they're doing the same thing we're doing. I don't know where they're going to go or what they're going to redeploy to, but I think it is a fair statement that by fall, I would be shocked if you don't see the low-cost overlap shrink by massive amounts because I know we're doing it, and I've seen other people doing it, and I think that'll probably be good for them, and I think it'll probably be really good for the whole industry.
Do you have a contingency plan to pick up assets potentially on the cheap if they become available at some future point? I'm not saying a deal, a merger per se, but.
Yeah, so look, I don't—I keep hearing many of the same rumors. I don't know and pretend to know what their situation is. I mean, you're talking a little more dire. I was speaking a moment ago just in that we're all managing our own businesses. Yeah, if there's something more structural that were to take place, I mean, obviously, we would look at it at that time, but I mean, I'm under the assumption there it's not as dire as many people. I think it's maybe challenging, but I don't think things are as imminent as people may.
There's room for two.
Oh, I think, well, look, it's a big market. I think there's room for two or three, but you can't all be in the same markets at the same time. It's a big country. We need to explore the other 70% of it.
Okay. So help me think through the sale-leaseback phenomenon because I'm clearly aware of what's permissible under GAAP. And I think.
Well, there's what's permissible, but there's what's required.
Okay, fair. Unlike a discount airline in India, which books sale-leaseback premiums as revenue, which really strikes me as kind of funky, I still don't really have my arms around that, taking those gains into.
I think some of those do have flexibility. We don't have. I think ours is actually more action.
But just philosophically, it doesn't really make sense. I just think of the top line as reflective of demand and not aircraft financing decisions.
Yeah, it's a cost.
Yes.
It's the last place I would think it would be used in revenue.
Right, right. But in your case, it's a contract expense, which adds pretty significant margin benefit at the end of the day. So walk us through how that's a sustainable strategy because it seems that the moment you would stop engaging in sale-leaseback activity, you'd have a year-on-year CASM problem or escalation. I don't know what the magnitude would be.
Well, let's back up. Let's back up for a second. Philosophically, if you buy planes, arguably, in some cases, better than others, maybe at a lower price.
If you have an ownership advantage.
If you have an ownership advantage, it delivers higher margins. Okay? I will give you an example of an airline that I've been following for close to 30 years that it doesn't show up as a sale-leaseback. It just shows up as cheaper ownership. That's Southwest Airlines. I don't know what they pay for a Boeing 737, but I suspect it's one of the cheapest on the planet.
Ryanair as well.
Ryanair as well. There's a rumor of another one here in the US that has an end to them, but who knows? Just rumors. But these carriers have enjoyed margin benefit for decades, decades, because they paid less for something than some of their peers. Just as the way the accounting was changed a few years ago. So what we were doing before the accounting was you took the sale-leaseback gain, which we buy well if you take that, and we spread it over the life of the lease. That changed a few years ago, and the accounting requires us, requires us, if it is regular and recurring and I have an accountant right here who can explain this to you, if it's regular and recurring, which it is in our case, that you must take it the way that we're taking it.
So it is a gain, and yes, you see that it's material. But we have studied this over and over and over, and it is economically about the same as if we had debt finance. So we would have the same margins because we would have lower ownership costs. And so this boogeyman approach that everybody, "Oh, the earnings aren't real. Oh, it's sale-leaseback." No, they're real. They're very real. And in fact, you're just seeing the transparent breakout of it. And in fact, you can then take our order book and figure out that we have a major cost advantage, and we have a major asset that's in the area code of our market cap. And so everybody needs to take a deep breath. And I don't know who started that whole thing of the boogeyman. This is not real profits. It's absolutely real profits.
It's real profits. It's real cash, and that is the accounting. To your last point, is it sustainable? Well, yeah. I mean, we're going to continue to grow at our pace and can continue to grow at our pace for a long, long time, just as Southwest did.
But doesn't the sale-leaseback market need to be there? Not that we're modeling for it to go away, but changes in that regard I mean, are you confident that you're always going to be able to sell a plane back to a lessor at a significant premium to work with?
In the last three weeks, I've been in Singapore, Japan, ISTAT, and I can assure you the market is there.
Okay. Well, probably a topic that'll come up tomorrow when we have all the aircraft lessors here.
Yeah. No, look, there's a lot of demand out there, especially look, if you're the lowest cost in your territory and you have Airbus, you're in pretty good demand these days.
All right. GTF update?
Sure.
You have one?
Oh, you want one from me?
That's good.
So look, we started taking the GTF about a year and a half ago. We don't have any of the powder-metal inspections yet. I think they come up later this summer, in the summer. And so we don't see any impact to this coming to us. I can't get into commercial details, but we don't expect a financial impact to this.
Yeah. All right. Any questions from the audience? Got a few minutes left. Mark, you want to kick us off? Mark Streeter, J.P. Morgan.
Please identify yourself into the microphone.
Barry, two years ago, you were willing to do a Spirit deal at economics that were aggressive, not as aggressive as what jetBlue ultimately did, but you were willing to do a deal. There's a lot of speculation in this room about what might happen to them. What are the conditions that would, given where Frontier is right now, given your guidance and so forth, what are the conditions that would allow you to sort of think about reengaging, if you will, in the tenets of that? Because I still think getting bigger and so forth, being more relevant, etc., having access to more aircraft under the right conditions might still be an attractive proposition for you. So how should we think about, because everyone's asking me, "Well, if Spirit files or hits the wall, is Frontier going to show up?
Look, conditions change, and we are focused on ourselves right now. I'm not just saying that. It's not just a stock answer. We're spending zero energy on this. I mean, we were disappointed last year in what happened. I mean, we were knocking on double-digit right at 10% Q2. This capacity expansion kind of came in and kind of ruined things for us and others. So we're focused on fixing that. We are, I would say, 80% done with doing that. It's not all deployed yet, but in terms of the planning and the execution, we're almost there. We really don't have time to even spend energy thinking about it. So our focus right now is come hell or high water, get back to double-digit margins, and then we'll talk about if there's something out there.
I wish them luck, and I think I said it earlier. I think we have recognized and maybe we're just—I know we say things, and people are like, "Oh, it's shocking," and then people quietly admit it over the months and quarters later, the same things. But yeah, we all flew too much to Florida. News flash. So we got to unravel that, and they do too. Or they don't have to. I guess they could continue doing the same thing, but it's probably not a good recipe. There's other carriers too. So I think you kind of need to see how that unfolds in the U.S. and see what that does to everyone's margins and their businesses, and then you understand the landscape.
I think that's the last step, if you will, to kind of get past kind of the COVID explosion because you had the COVID hit, you had the demand hit, and then you had people taking aircraft like us. And then when we all redeployed, it got uneven. And so that needs to even back out now. And so I think until you see that, it's hard to say what anybody's business is worth.
Is it fair to say we just had JetBlue up here, and they were talking about how we didn't talk about it directly, but when they were trying to buy Spirit, they were doing it because they wanted to bulk up and become bigger and become more relevant? Now that they're not buying Spirit, they're still trying to figure out a way to become bigger and more relevant. When you look at your deal that you were trying to do with them, do the same tenets of the deal hold? Again, having access to the airplanes, the pilots, the real estate, becoming more relevant, having a bigger loyalty program, etc., is that still it? Might not be your focus right now, but is that still your focus longer term?
Well, look, it is a true fact. And for those who didn't know, I worked in the legacy space for 10 years, American US Airways. So I'm well aware of how the S-curve influences revenue production and how that drives—I mean, Jamie mentioned frequent flyer program earlier. That's how you get to frequent flyer programs. You got to have—you got to reach a tipping point and inflection that you're relative enough for the consumer, both in where they can earn as well as where they can burn. And so we are very conscious of the benefits of scale. We are, however, going down a different path in order to get there.
I mean, I'll give you Cincinnati, right? I mean, no one really cares about Cincinnati. We've put a base there. We fly to three times as many places nonstop as number two. And it's small, but we're getting scaled there. So no, I don't.
Nobody once cared about Cincinnati.
Well, okay. I mean, but same thing in Cleveland, right? I mean, we're 2-3X number two in terms of places. The mayor loves me. I mean, I love him. I'm going to see their opening baseball day in a couple of weeks. But we've figured out how to get there in a different way, which is in some of these more small to midsize cities, we can get to a point of scale. And guess what happens? All of a sudden, now your frequent flyer penetration goes up. Now they get your credit card. And so we're kind of manufacturing it in the places we can be scalable, and we're seeing that be beneficial. JetBlue is in a different place where, look, they got one of the largest markets in the world, New York. And it's a tougher place, right? I mean, you've got United at Newark.
You've got Delta and American and all those plays, but it's harder to be relevant against that major heft. And so I don't envy the situation they have in trying to get more scale in some of the biggest markets in the world.
One last thing for me. We don't have your finance team here up on stage, but my understanding is in the fourth quarter, you were feeling people out about maybe doing a brand loyalty, gates deal, something like that, raising some capital. You didn't do the deal, but given your guide now for 2024, where are you standing in terms of your liquidity and capital raising? Should we expect you to raise some incremental liquidity? Are you now feeling more bullish about the market given your guide?
Yeah. Look, I think there was some concerns about our liquidity. I think that was possibly misplaced. We had over $600 million in cash at the end of the year. We're in a actually net positive against debt. I think if you look around the space, that's not necessarily true with most folks. We don't have really material debt. We do look in the marketplace. We did actually test the market, if you will, and looked at what financing would give. But we at this time obviously don't need it. But we stay pretty close to the market.
All right. Sounds good. Any other questions before we turn the room over to our keynote speaker? Yep. Got one in the back there.
Let's see. I wanted to ask you about any cities that you might need slots for. Are there any cities you might be looking to do slot deals? Maybe you're constrained in some way as you grow?
Well, look, in the United States, the two airports that are material are LaGuardia and DCA. And we are in both, not a huge presence in either. But you can pretty much grow, I mean, you can get into Newark, for example, maybe not in the prime times of the day, but you can get into Newark. You can even get into JFK most of the day. So in the United States, those are really the only two. And they're a tiny amount of the overall business. We were fortunate to get a couple of slot pairs this summer to increase our service at LaGuardia. But I mean, it's not material.
But I think I'll never forget I was when I was back at Spirit a long time ago, and this is 15 years ago, probably, maybe more. I'll never forget we were trying to figure out how to fix Spirit. And Spirit, at the time, was like 15%-20% of the airline was at LaGuardia. And the previous owners were so excited about LaGuardia, and I was like, "Yeah, but we lose money." And they're like, "Well, how are we how are we going to be an airline without flying LaGuardia?" And I remember at the time, I was like, "Southwest has 400 aircraft, and they don't even fly to LaGuardia. For God's sake, why do you think you need to be there?" And so I'll tell you, I'll go where we can make money. And I wouldn't worry about slots in this country, not for folks like us.
Well, listen, John, because you're a friend, one more upfront.
So I'm trying to just check with my folks out here. So you've done a great job as NPS officer today. If you go back to 2019, the spread between, sorry. If you go back to 2019, the spread that Frontier was paying for an A320 captain versus a United or a Delta was perceived to be a competitive cost advantage for you. COVID hit, pilot salaries escalated. But today, we were told United's pausing their pilot training, Southwest is pausing some of their pilot training. Is it possible that the spread that you had in 2019 could come back, and you'd actually be paying pilots less to fly an A320 at Frontier than Delta or United?
Well, so we do not have our deal just became open, actually, two months ago. But what the market has suggested, so let's don't talk about us. Let's talk about what the market has suggested. I know there was this idea that pilot wages were going to converge. The market really hasn't done that. There's been a huge convergence at the bottom. The regionals have come way up. And quite honestly, it's pretty ridiculous how low, let's be clear, FOs were making at regionals. The fact that some of them could qualify for food stamps just 10 or 15 years ago was kind of ridiculous, right? So it needed to come up. But you haven't seen the compression between the low costs and the top that I think was suggested. Having said that, yes, the pilot shortage appears to have screeched to a halt.
You saw this about six months ago when the regionals started being able to fill their openings. That was kind of the canary in the coal mine. We've had to slow down our hiring as well because we've had our own attrition for years. Unfortunately, we hire two pilots for every pilot that we're going to have. And it's about an 8-10-month kind of lead time through this process. So what happened to us over the last couple of months is we were like, "Oh my gosh, if we don't change this now, we're going to have a major cost problem because I'm going to end up with way too many pilots." So we have slowed it down. We're not stopping, but we've slowed it down.
But yeah, I think with what you've seen, there's not really, I think Southwest has stopped. I think United paused. I think Delta has slowed down. So yeah, it's not as dire.
It's not the constraint that it once was.
Yeah. I don't think it's as dire as we thought. I think it's actually healthy. You don't really want that kind of disruption that we had had. I think this is good.
But still, top-end Spirit rates are a lot closer to Delta rates than what they were before this latest round of labor cost.
Yeah, but they're still over 20-some-odd% discount. I mean, it's a discount.
Well, versus a juniority.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Well, you're probably never going to get rid of that. We have to cede the room to our next speaker. Barry, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me .