Robert Isom: So Michael, I’ll reiterate some comments I made earlier this morning and Nate Gatten, who heads up our government affairs is going to chime in here as well. I’ll just start with this, yes, we have the same interest as the DOT, which is taking care of customers and making sure that they get full value for what they pay. That’s the nature of our business. We’ve done incredibly well at executing on that front. We’re the most reliable airline in terms of completion factor, certainly over the last couple of years now.
And so we feel really good about that. In terms of what we do when disruptions happen, we refunded, I think, over $2 billion worth of customers’ ticket fares last year alone. And so we’re on top of the policies and the scorecards that are already established. I’d tell you that from kind of top of mind, the issues that there are a lot of issues that I think are still gray.
So if the intent of these rules is to really make sure airlines don’t over-schedule and in the event of disruptions don’t have meltdowns, which fortunately, I’m very confident in the way that we schedule an airline. We don’t overschedule. We make sure that we have the resources. And fortunately, we haven’t had the issues with major meltdowns certainly over the last couple of years.
If that’s the intent, fine, if the intent is something broader then we really need to be careful because there’s a couple of things that I feel are important to note. One is that we have the safest — we’ve built the safest form of transportation, air travel in the United States, based on just years of doing the right things and having the right motivations. When we talk about weather, and we talk about maintenance, those are synonymous to me with safety. And we have to make sure that the inputs to the system, the motivations, the penalties or rewards are consistent with the way we want our people motivated and operating.
And I think that, that’s something that we need to figure out. And then the other piece that I think is fairly gray is, look, there’s a lot of parties that are involved with air transportation. We control a lot of it. We certainly don’t control the weather, but we also depend on the FA for aircraft control, not just short run, in the long run as well. We have to make the right decisions for our customers. So in the event of diversions-related medical emergencies, we’re going to have to be smart in what we do and always put the customer first. We have hurricanes and volcanic eruptions, and all other things. We have to be smart about how we deploy our network and how we recover. We don’t want to end up in a situation where we end up not serving the customers in the way they want to be serviced just to avoid penalties.
So Nate, you’ve done a lot more research on that. I have to tell you, too, I’ve just seen the surface level. So I just want to bring up those kinds of things that I’ve mentioned in the past. Go ahead.
Nathan Gatten: Yes. Not too much to add to that, though, really, Robert. I mean I would just say our business model is built to support our customers when we don’t deliver and from what we’ve seen over the role so far, it is largely consistent with the policies that we currently have in place for refunds and cancellations. We do just need to drill down and make sure we understand the role when it comes to those gray areas that you mentioned.
Michael Linenberg: Great. And just a real quick second one here to Devon. Just the credit card deal renewal, is that a 2024 event? Or is that 2025? Just any color or timing around that?
Vasu Raja: We are actively working on the recommercialization of our credit card programs. Like we’ve mentioned at Investor Day, we haven’t done this in 10 years. We have a real opportunity to go and get it right. We anticipate sharing more news with everybody this year. It is a top and key project for us. And I will just say that unlike 10 years past or maybe like many of our competitors, we just bring a lot that makes us a really great partner for a credit card company.
First, to all of the points that Robert made earlier, we are growing advantage enrollment, it’s plus 60% versus a few years ago. That is a massive and booming segment, it’s 2/3 of our revenue. But very importantly, when you go and look underneath it, we look at 2 things in our card program. The first is the growth and active account. That is up close to 10% year-over-year. That means not only are we acquiring more, fewer people are trading away from the program.
But while that’s happening, our spend per active account is growing at 4%, that’s higher than what it’s grown before. In our program, it’s higher than what other industry cards grow at. And so really, what that tells us is, we have a great and growing customer base. They very much value the card that’s there. All the changes that have really been done have been done by American Airlines through the structure of our loyalty program Advantage. So we are very excited for what this can mean.
We know that there’s probably a number of partners out there who are comparably, if not even more excited about it. So we need to get it right because this thing is very impactful to our customers and of course very impactful to our bottom line.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Didora of Bank of America. Andrew.
Andrew Didora: Most of my questions have been answered. But Robert, just kind of wanted to ask on capacity. I know you reiterated your full year growth, and you hinted earlier that back half bends down a little bit. But you also talked about the RJ building throughout the end of the year and 3Q schedules still look to be up in the high single digits, which is pretty similar to the first half.
