Allegiant Travel Company (NASDAQ:ALGT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Greg Anderson: Savi, it’s Greg. Why don’t I give this one a stab, and what I would just say and the big takeaway is that I think as we plan the schedule for ’23, we’ve taken a very conservative approach in terms of attrition and onboarding and making sure that we have the available resources and crews to support those peak flying season, such as March in the summer. Just to put some more color around that, for the full year ’23, we’re expecting about a 25% system attrition on the pilot side. To put perspective in that in ’22, it was 17%. The last three months, however, it’s been roughly 20%. But again, the point being we’re expecting higher or we’re planning and scheduling for it to be higher than what we’ve seen historically or at least in the past three months and past year.

In terms of the school house and our ability to attract and bring on pilots, I think just to give some perspective there, we’re — every class, we’re anticipating around 12 new hires or pilots. We had two classes in January. There’s 30 pilots in that class. All in all just to kind of — to bring this together, I think we’re expecting roughly 200 to 250 new pilots join Allegiant during 2023. Really excited about what Tyler Hollingsworth and , Rod, our Chief Pilot, Tyler, our VP of Flight Ops. They’re also out there on the recruiting front and putting in additional pathway programs. So I think there’s five creative pathway programs today. They’re taking that to eight. And so we’re really doing — taking the appropriate steps, I think, to kind of protect and control our destiny.

And — but we’re planning for kind of the — we’re planning for a down case scenario. And so far, we feel good about that plan.

Operator: I am showing no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back over to John Redmond for closing remarks.

John Redmond: Well, we appreciate everyone’s time and questions, all great questions. You can see why we’re excited about ’23 in the out years. Great uses the term spring coiled as he mentioned for ’24, we wouldn’t be in a position but to the investments in ’21 and ’22. So we’re jazzing. And of course, those investments as we touched on our — not only all the IT infrastructure, et cetera, that we’re doing. But all the employee investments, everything from pilots, flight attendants, everything else we’re doing. So it’s a heavy CapEx lift, but it’s needed and required in order to take on the growth that we’re doing going forward. So stay tuned, ’23 is going to be amazing, but ’24 will be really something else. Thank you everyone.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

John Redmond: Great job, everyone, great time.