Michael Linenberg: Good numbers and outlook. Just on the aircraft, I want to clarify. Jude, I thought you said you’re taking two airplanes in the March quarter. And then Dave said, we’ll be taking one to two this year. Is that one to two that are incremental to the two because maybe those two showed up last year and they’re being put in service? I want a clarification around that.
Dave Davis: Yeah, it’s what you just said. So the two that are coming in in the first quarter were purchased last year and going through induction. They’ll be entering service. And then, the one to two that I mentioned are incremental to those two.
Michael Linenberg: These airplanes, they’re all being cash financed or debt financed. Right? You’ve moved away from leases, right?
Dave Davis: Yeah. We haven’t done any operating leases. And we don’t intend to do any operating leases. It will be either debt financings, pay cash for them or enter into finance leases, which gives us basically a purchase option. So, yeah, that’s how we finance all of them.
Michael Linenberg: Just from a modeling perspective, you’re down to like just over $1 million of rentals. Does that does that go to zero sometime this year? Or is it next year? Or is there always going to be a little residual there?
Dave Davis: We have a couple more aircraft that are on operating leases. I think probably 2026?
Jude Bricker: 2024.
Dave Davis: 2024 for both of them. Yeah. So after that, I guess our rentals will go to zero. Yeah.
Jude Bricker: There might be some engine leases from time to time.
Dave Davis: A few miscellaneous things like that, but that line should drive to zero.
Michael Linenberg: Lastly, Jude, you have made some interesting comments about how things have sort of shifted and changed through COVID and a few comments maybe a month €“ well, this is actually several months ago, about how demand was shifting through the week. And was it less business travel or more leisure? I think you made a comment about the fact that the fares were so high during peak period that it was pushing more demand into like Tuesday, Wednesday and helping out with sort of volatility on demand and pricing through the week. Any additional thoughts around that? It’s always interesting. As it relates maybe to your March quarter demand, I’m all ears.
Jude Bricker: I think there’s been a lot of commentary about leisure and travel patterns being kind of pushed into a more flexible customer base where you can travel on Tuesdays, you can travel in offseason. And my commentary was mostly that I see the same uplift in off-peak periods, but I don’t have any reason €“ I can’t go as far as Scott Kirby, for example, to draw a causal relationship. And I think we should be careful about it. So what we’re seeing is dollar improvement, roughly the same across all periods. But on a percentage basis then, it’s a bigger percentage increase in off-peak. So I think there is an opportunity for us to expand utilization into off-peak periods, but I’m very careful about adjusting that entire strategy towards taking advantage of these opportunities because I think a big reason off-peak has been expanding the way it has is because fares are so high.
And so, you get that value shoppers that are adjusting their schedules to find lower fares. And I don’t know if that’s really a permanent shift in behavior.
Michael Linenberg: But it sounds like you’ll take advantage of it when you can, right?
Jude Bricker: Yeah. So, if you look at monthly, year over year percentage growth, we’ll show the highest percentage growth in September in 2023. That’s our weakest month. And that’s a function of us just having more opportunity in those months because fares are generally higher.
