Southwest Airlines Co. (NYSE:LUV) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Savi Syth: And that’s pilots and that’s all labor groups…?

Bob Jordan: It’s all.

Savi Syth: And I mean the driver of that increase, was it kind of all labor groups driving it up or this quarter more because of pilot — you’ve seen some pilot…

Bob Jordan: It’s anywhere we saw an increase on — so if you have an open contract that we’re still in negotiations, it’s anywhere where the market moved, we updated our accruals. So, in my mind, we are fully accrued to the market. And just — I mean, just on that note, just a little side, we just had some good news this morning. We had — we got a notice that we have ratification of a new agreement with our mechanics and related employees in AMFA. So, they just ratified contract extension four years through 2027 this morning. So, a little bit of good news there, another one. So, I think that makes 7 in the last 9 months, so.

Operator: Our next question will come from Duane Pfennigwerth with Evercore ISI.

Duane Pfennigwerth: Just on the — I mean, you noted some of the reasons that you need to kind of tweak the network. But could you comment on maybe geographically, and I don’t know how you look at it internally, maybe Hawaii, Midwest, West Coast, East Coast, how much variation is there across the U.S. as we think about that third quarter guidance, what is stronger versus what is weaker? And then, just on the network changes broadly, why start in January? If you’ve identified changes that need to happen, why not start in September or the fourth quarter? What are the practical reasons not to do that?

Ryan Green: Yes. Hey Duane, it’s Ryan. Just on the geographic elements and kind of what’s stronger versus what are we seeing that’s weaker. The Hawaii franchise itself, now that is — that’s part of our markets that are under development. And so there is the development element of that, but we’ve been very pleased with the Hawaii franchise overall, especially the main lands of Hawaii, element of that franchise. Load factors are very high. Yields are improving. So we’re very, very happy with how Hawaii is performing. To your comments on why — network changes, we have made some changes to the network in Intra-Cal and that intra-Cal itself, despite the West Coast being a little bit slower to come back in the recovery, Intra-Cal itself is performing well.

Leisure-based markets, Florida is performing well, just typically strong leisure markets in this environment continue to perform very well for us in the strong leisure environment. So that kind of gives you a flavor for what’s going well. The opportunities, we — there are markets as we brought back the network and restored the network, there are different geographies that have different levels of capacity kind of as we bring those cities back. And obviously, you have to work to absorb the capacity as it comes into the market. So, we’re working on those markets where there’s kind of been outsized capacity growth, and we’ll continue to focus there. But, one of the things that Southwest Airlines benefits from is we have largely a relatively diverse domestic footprint.

And as different parts of the country respond differently and have go through different economic cycles, we’re able to kind of weather that a little bit better maybe than some of our peers. So, that’s an inherent advantage for us as we go forward.

Duane Pfennigwerth: I mean — go ahead.

Andrew Watterson: I’m sorry. Duane, it’s Andrew. I’d also add that we want to — when you make change to your network, you want to kind of understand before you make fulsome changes. So, we have been making adjustments. So, in September as the first schedule we have on modified Tuesday, Wednesday capacity versus Monday, Thursday, Friday, so we — it’s not as aggressive as we have started in January. So we want to have that out there and see how — both to understand that before we started making changes and then some of the network changes that we’re doing, we also stepped into them over the course of September through fourth quarter. We like what we saw on the forward bookings and so we made the kind of full adjustment starting in Q1. So, it’s essentially done by March, except for the seasonality type adjustments I talked about will obviously happen as that season rolls around.

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