Blade Air Mobility, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLDE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Stephen Ju: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. And I am showing we have a follow-up question from Bill Peterson with J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.

Bill Peterson: Yes. Thanks for taking the follow-up question. And again, you guys talked about seasonality. But specific to areas like (ph), you, obviously, benefitted from your Hamptons product, maybe they always fly to one airport currently there. What are the latest bookings trends? And I guess, how should we think about that as we go into the summer and into the fall given that, obviously, things due to the pandemic look a lot different now relative to they been over the past few years?

Rob Wiesenthal: Okay. I think you’re coming in and out. Can you just maybe repeat the question one more time? I guess, it’s very difficult to hear you.

Bill Peterson: My apologies. I wanted to talk about your flight to and from Hamptons that maybe — that benefited from — and sort of explains the — how a lot of those tied to the pandemic, people going back and forth. Curious on how that should look moving forward? (ph) fly to one airport now at higher price points, but just trying to get a feel for how that business should trend out that we’re, I guess, largely past the pandemic?

Rob Wiesenthal: Sure. Okay. With respect to airports, I understand that we are flying both to Newark and , not just one airport and we’re flying both in the east side and the west side. But going back to your Hamptons question, during Omicron, a year ago, as a courtesy to customers, we offered a very low price with past is that $295 to allow people who wanted to live out of the city. I think there was a fear of staying in the city and they wanted to come into the city for a short amount of time and go back, call it home or their secondary homes close to 100 miles away. We quickly saw this returning a lot more to a resort/remote working environment as we did last summer where Fridays essentially became Thursdays and Mondays became Sundays.

And in fact, we layered on a price increase from the previous number of $795 to $1025, and that went right through the system, no problems, we didn’t see a lot of — didn’t see any, in fact, any kind of decline in terms of that ability of people willing to take that price across most of our products. So, what I would say is going forward, it’s kind of a little bit of a hybrid, which is — and good for us because whereas we used to have potentially, I don’t want to say difficulty, but it was strenuous to say the least to find all enough operators to find this massive fleet that has to go out on a Friday and come back on a Sunday given the fact that it’s spread out, you have a lot more opportunities to recover in case that there’s a mechanical, people are a lot more flexible in terms of going in different times because of weather, there still is that back and forth, it has become a seven-day business.

That is a truism. But the peakishness in terms of weekends where you make a lot of your cash has definitely spread from outgoing on Thursdays and Fridays and incoming on Sundays and Mondays, plus the returns which typically were empty, no longer empty. People are flying in both directions. But I think that the key point is compared to a year ago, this idea that I want to predominantly live out of the city and come into the city maybe once a week, that’s kind of gone. What we’re seeing now is more back to, “This is my second home. I made you some remote work there. It’s not going to just be a Friday to Sunday type product. It’s going to move around a week depending on my needs at the office and my needs at home.”