Alaska Air Group, Inc. (NYSE:ALK) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Savi Syth: Just to clarify, but just on the staffing side, taking and trading. The training is related to the fleet transition, right? Are you fairly caught up in just being able to source the pilots for the capacity.

Benito Minicucci: Right. Yes. We’re going through a lot of the A320 Airbus pilot transition right now. So we’ll be through it by the end of the first quarter And so that’s going through all our school house right now. Same thing with the Q400s and the Embraer 175. So we’ll be largely done that big by wave.

Operator: And we’ll go next to Scott Group with Wolfe Research.

Scott Group: I just want to go back to the revenue guide. So it looks like RASM decelerating from when I look versus ’19, decelerating from fourth quarter to first quarter and then reaccelerating the rest of the year. Just help us understand that. Is that a market view? Is that something specific to you guys? Just any color there?

Andrew Harrison: Yes, Scott. So a couple of things, and we’ve talked about this before, obviously, but our first quarter is always the weakest. And a little bit business travels certainly in January has been highly choppy and did not return as much as we had hoped. But I think if you take a step back and look at our revenue in general, and you even go back to 2019, our unit revenue guide for the first quarter are right in line with the industry’s unit guides. And they also have very big international travel coming back, which I think will be a big tailwind for them. And again, for the year, we’re about right where our industry is — but again, for us, we’ve got work to do again on January and February on the network side. We do need to make sure that we construct our network to handle these lulls in our demand. But again, March and forward is very solid.

Scott Group: Okay. And then, Shane, I think you said that there’s a fuel hedging loss embedded in the guide for this year. Just — how much is that — maybe just bigger picture, like the issue has been crack spreads not so much crude. Like any thoughts on revisiting how you guys hedge? I know it’s more complicated, but it seems like it would be a much more effective way to hedge if you want to hedge it all.

Nathaniel Pieper: Scott, it’s Nat Pieper. Thanks for the question on fuel. I think first on just our hedging program. We started this 20% out of the money calls, very straightforward, formulaic back in 2015, broke even basically 2015 to 2021. And then as you cited, and as we said in the script, 2022 it turned out to be a profitable thing. But as you know, we’re not hedging to make money. We’re hedging just to eliminate volatility — we think it’s a good way to use our strong balance sheet and it just gives us some better insights in our planning as we move forward. We have spent a considerable amount of time with investment banking friends back on the East Coast about ways to potentially to hedge the crack spread, you’re right, and that that’s been the main source of frustration, volatility, et cetera.

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