Duane Pfennigwerth: Thanks. I appreciate those direct answers. But maybe just to throw out an alternative, if you can’t get your margins going in the right direction next year, if it’s more like 25% or 26%, what might you consider strategically or put on the table that hasn’t been on the table before? So if you think about things like seat assignments, base economy, bags fly free, historically, those have been sacrosanct. I mean, would there be more of an urgency to more aggressively take a look at the product and the service offering if you can’t get there next year?
Bob Jordan: Yes. I mean, again, we’re working on our 2024 plan, so we’re not ready to lay all that out. The last set of initiatives that we took you through several years ago, the $1 billion to $1.5 billion in EBIT this year are paying off, and we’ll have a next set. Some of those, I think, will make perfect sense. We have the ability to put flights into places where we can drive, obviously, operating leverage. So, those flight activities come on at lower CASM rates. We have some areas where we can continue to really push the generation of revenue outside the cabin. Obviously, that centers around the Rapid Rewards program development. And other areas, we have opportunities in terms of how we fly the aircraft and where we can drive up utilization and generate additional ASMs without having to take on capital costs on new aircraft.
I’m just not — we’re just not ready to share the whole plan with you. I’m just trying to convey that we’re hard at work, and there is a lot on the table. To your specific question about things in the cabin or boarding, I would go back to what Ryan said, which is we are going to follow the lead of our customers. And if our customers ultimately tell us that that is what they want, and that is what we will do. We’re not ready to — obviously not ready to say that today. But our customers will dictate what is important to them, whether that’s an attribute of the product or things that are around boarding in the cabin. So again, don’t read too much into that, but just to understand that that is something that we are constantly taking a look at.
Duane Pfennigwerth: I appreciate that. I guess over the years, you deserve the benefit of the doubt when you’re printing industry-leading margins and saying we’re going to go with what our customers want. But if you have lagging margins, it may require a harder look. But, I appreciate you taking the questions. Thank you.
Bob Jordan: Yes. I would just add — I understand. And just we will be absolutely relentless in meeting our goals. That includes driving out efficiency and productivity that includes improving the revenue side of the equation, and that includes driving ourselves back to industry-leading margins. You have my commitment.
Operator: Our next question comes from Mike Linenberg from Deutsche Bank.
Mike Linenberg: Two here. I guess, first one to Andrew, if I caught you correctly, you had indicated that you were moving up your international service from Fort Lauderdale to Orlando. I mean, Fort Lauderdale, I think, has been one of your original international gateways. What were the factors that drove you to move up? I mean, I know you have a pilot domicile in Orlando, but it is a smaller local market. That seems to be a pretty meaningful move.
Andrew Watterson: Thanks, Mike. I appreciate the question. We — as we mentioned earlier, we were — we have relooked at our network and moved our capacity around. So, it’s both the amount of capacity and the nature of the capacity. We did both of those moves. First, we kind of were doing the nature with our reconfiguration that Tammy referenced earlier. And for Orlando, we do have a lot more northbound flights, if you will. The international destinations, even though they loom large in our mind, they actually are modest-sized markets that require a decent amount of connectivity to fill them up. And so, Orlando being a little bit further north and having more flights for Southwest Airlines north of Orlando allows us to have the good complement of the local plus the flow.
So a lot of the international destinations were to take our customer base here on vacation because we are a repeat purchase business. And so, we want our network in any given location to offer chances to fly for business, to go to Orlando, to go to Vegas, to go see grandma, to go on vacation and the beach. And so sometimes that’s nonstop, sometimes that’s connecting. And for a lot of the international, it requires us to offer that as a connection for some of our kind of further northern cities. So, Orlando, the combination of the local market plus allowing us to access our big customer bases on the Upper Midwest and Northeast makes a more network sense given scarce capacity, if you will. So net-net, that made sense. And then also, as you mentioned, the crew base in Orlando also makes the costs to serve that go down because you’re not staging crews in down to Fort Lauderdale.
So work on both sides of the equation, as Bob said, revenue and costs, it made more sense for our international anchor in the Southeast to be Orlando.
Mike Linenberg: Andrew, just to sort of follow up on that, like 1.5 years ago, 2 years ago when you guys talked about some of your initiatives. One of the focuses for longer term was to increase your connectivity. Is this a bit of a trial run in sort of focusing on this one market? And if it succeeds that that type of connectivity, you’ll look at applying that to other gateway cities. Is that sort of the plan here?
Andrew Watterson: No, I think this is — during COVID, we had a kind of — when demand was way down, and we have bigger aircraft, we don’t have a lot of RJs, we had to use more than usual connectivity to fill our aircraft. And then post-COVID, we went back to our normal, which is felt between 25% and 30% of our customers in our connecting itinerary, that’s been fairly stable, but they’re concentrated in certain areas, they help us fill up the early and late parts of the day and they also help us support certain geographies. So going to Hawaii, we have — we have certain gateways there that allow us to access our customers in land access Hawaii. The same thing for international, a combination of Baltimore plus now Orlando helps you access international from parts of our network. So connectivity has always been the icing, not the cake, but we were very intentional about how we use it.
