JetBlue Airways Corporation (NASDAQ:JBLU) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Dave Clark: Sure. And just to go a bit deeper, Chris, I mean, some of the things we’re doing around scheduling more out of crew bases has just been swapping of aircraft type. For example, we’ve largely moved our E190 flying out of Florida as we soon will no longer have E190 crew bases there, whereas we used to fly a lot from non-base locations in Florida before then. So that’s one example. Also working very closely across departments to plan further ahead, years ahead. So when we think about big infrastructure that we’ll need, we’re planning it earlier with both the revenue in mind as well as the operating team. So I think it’s just good additional robustness we’re doing. I don’t expect material RASM impact from any of this, but I do expect better, sort of, cost and just general efficiency as we have more robust cross-functional planning even further ahead than today.

Joanna Geraghty: And I think if you look at the holiday period, that very much played out in terms of the strong completion factor performance we had and our ability to deliver on the revenue plan that we had. And so to Robin’s point, this is the new normal for the foreseeable future, and we’re going to plan this way. And there are benefits that we will see play out in completing the schedule and not incurring many of the costs that you would otherwise incur if you’re running late and/or having to cancel flights and the revenue cost.

Robin Hayes: I mean, I’ll give you a real life example. Let’s talk about last night. So we had weather come into the Northeast. We were in ground delay programs and ground stops at all the New York airports. The ground delay program at JFK reached over 3.5 hours, which means every domestic flight coming into JFK last night had an average of 3.5 hours of delay. There were 749 cancellations in and out of the US yesterday. JetBlue was three of those. So our ability to kind of complete that schedule because we have planned more resiliently, executed whether on night, clearly drives the benefit of having not to refund those tickets, not at the expense of rebooking those customers. And I think the operational — a more conservative operational philosophy change is just not how we have to think about operational costs, but over time, will drive some benefit on the commercial side as well.

Chris Stathoulopoulos: Great. Thank you.

Joe Caiado: Great. Well, thanks, everyone. That concludes our fourth quarter 2022 conference call. Thanks for joining us. Have a great day.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating, and we ask that you please disconnect your lines.