It’s still early, obviously, when we look at that far, but we’re very optimistic. And domestically, Gerry set us up at a really good fleet plan where we have a significant number of older A320 and A319 aircraft that we could easily fly less or we could put on the ground if we thought that was necessary as we solve to reach the right margin and right EPS targets that we have for the year.Duane Pfennigwerth Thanks for the thoughts.Operator The next question comes from Helane Becker from Cowen. Your line is unmuted. Please go ahead.Helane Becker Thanks very much operator. Hi, everybody. Thank you for the time. Two questions. One, did you say what pension contribution would be this year? And if not, could you? And then the other question I had was just on United Next and where you are in ‘23 versus the plan?
And what progress is on maybe some of the bigger items. I think you just addressed Andrew, the regional jet and the narrow-body shift connecting smaller cities or connecting bank changes or something like that? Thanks.Gerry Laderman Hey, Helane, yes, we did not say anything about pension. Nothing’s changed from our recent disclosures. There is – we expect no pension contributions this year. Our pensions are in good shape and both with the pension calculations that can be made and interest rates having nicely reduced the liabilities. We wouldn’t expect any pension contributions actually for a couple of years.Helane Becker That’s great to know.Andrew Nocella On the United Next comment, as I indicated a bit earlier, my number one focus domestically is this connectivity issue.
We can clearly see it when we look at our RASM by flight by market that we are just – we’re missing a lot of connectivity relative to where we were. And so as we go forward, we’re going to be very focused on rebuilding that connectivity and getting the bank sizes back to where they were, hopefully, in 2019, but it is going to take some time. But we’re optimistic just like we did it in 2017 and 2018. And that we’re going to do it again, and it’s going to be very accretive to margin profitability and, of course, to RASM as we build back the connectivity. So it is a really important focus of our domestic flying, and we’re ready to get that implemented as soon as possible.Helane Becker That’s very helpful. Thank you.Operator The next question comes from Ravi Shanker from Morgan Stanley.
Your line is unmuted. Please go ahead.Ravi Shanker Thanks. Good morning, everyone. I think despite the kind of tough macro outlook, pretty clear what you guys are expecting that things are fine for now, but there is high probability of a tail risk event. Can you help us with kind of what data points you’re looking at to determine if these tail risks are either receding or materializing? Are these kind of airline specific data points or these broader macro data points into the latter kind of – where are some of those data points you are referring?Scott Kirby Well, maybe I will start and talk about it from a business traffic recovery and what we are seeing in there, because I do think one of the most common questions I get is business traffic recovering and what is it going to look like.
And first of all, I wonder whether the old methods of measuring business travel will be the same in the future. But for now, it’s all we really have to really benchmark against 2019. I will say that as we look at business traffic three different ways, the first is from larger corporations that have a contract with United. The second from a set of demands from agencies that specialized in business traffic. And the third is based on ticket attributes. The third is clearly the most encompassing view as it includes small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have an agency or don’t have a contract for United. So, in Q4, the revenue recovery rate was between 70% and 85% for these three categories. In Q1, the revenue recovery rate for these three measurements range from 85% to 97%.
And for the first two weeks of April, the recovery ranged from 95% to 101%. I think this data in the last two weeks of April was a surprise to us as we have seen more conservative measurements, start to approach 100%. The fact that large corporations are getting close to 100%, is a nice tailwind to United. As many of you know, this is critically important – critically important component to our revenues. I will also say that the recovery in global long-haul business is a few points of head of domestic. And all these measurements are just a good sign that our planned international revenue increases, our capacity increases are moving in the right direction. We obviously need more time to see if this trend will hold. But what I can tell you in the last week or so after reviewing this data become a lot more positive even as many of the headlines continue to predict a recession.
As I have said in my opening statement, the trends for May look ahead of March. I can also confirm in absolute dollars the last 14 days have been the best booking days for business traffic revenue that we have seen since the pandemic. I will also add, since this step-up in business demand is very recent, we have not incorporated it into our revenue outlook for the quarter.Ravi Shanker That’s incredibly helpful. Thank you for the color there. And since my follow-up question was going to be about SMB versus enterprise corporate. I will switch it up and ask you about the cargo business. Obviously, a small portion of the business, but probably very volatile given that there was one of the bigger kind of pandemic era winners, how are you seeing that evolve through ‘23 and ‘24?
And what’s the normalized level there?Scott Kirby Yes. So, I mean cargo stepped down in Q1 and stepped down exactly with our plan, still well ahead of 2019, which is nice to see. But we are seeing very low prices, low yields across the system, particularly outside of United. We have been – I think we have done a great job of holding yields where they are at through our – really the best cargo team in the world, in my opinion. But not only is air freight challenges now, but also sea freight where rates are incredibly low. So, we are holding our own. I think again, we are executing consistent with our plan, and we have got this baked in for the rest of the year. We do expect to see more and more pressure on cargo yields going forward. But the United team is executing in an amazing way.
Our relative size to our primary competitors, you can see it in the numbers. And so I am still actually bullish about the business relative to 2019. But look, it’s last Q1 in particular, we reached an unbelievable high based on where we were with the pandemic and COVID. We didn’t expect we would be able to re-achieve that number, and we didn’t. But again, we are on plan.Ravi Shanker Okay. Thank you.Operator The next question comes from Sheila Kahyaoglu from Jefferies. Your line is un-muted. Please go ahead.Sheila Kahyaoglu Good morning everyone and thank you. Scott, I wanted to ask you maybe a cost question. You have been fairly up, spoken about airlines needing more employees for the same level of operations. And your ASMs per employee are now just 3% below 2019 versus 6% to 7% in the second half of ‘22.
And presumably, there is some advanced hiring as you are preparing for new aircraft. Is there room to further close the gap versus 2019 on this basis as we think about ASM mix and new aircraft deliveries?Scott Kirby Well, I guess we will see. But I feel really good about what we have done with running with higher resources than we did pre-pandemic, it’s leading to the best operation that one of the countries run the best operation, frankly, that we have ever run. That’s great for our customers. That’s great for our brand. I also think it’s turning out at least right now in this environment to be the lowest CASM outcome, that by being able to run a reliable operation, most sensitivity [ph] and being able to run a reliable operation is what is giving us the best CASM results in the industry and given us confidence about CASM results going forward.
So, I think we are at the right place at the moment. It’s obviously very – if the operating environment gets easier down the road, it’s obviously easy to adjust that, especially as we are growing just slip down the hiring for a month or two months and you are right back to where you were, so, easy to adjust, but I feel – I am really proud of how the team has done operationally. And I think it has been the lowest CASM outcome we could have had by running reliable operations.Sheila Kahyaoglu And if I could just ask a question about your premium performance, which was pretty good, premium relative to 2019, up 25% compared to total domestic up 5%. Can you break that out in any sort of way, whether it’s RASM or yield performance? How we should think about the continued growth there?Andrew Nocella Sure.
I mean I have been really happy actually with our progress on the premium side in all of our cabins, particularly for Polaris. We have been just making a ton of progress in the Polaris cabin given the rebound in business traffic, but we still have more to come. In March, for example, our load factor was up 10 points year-over-year and 5 points versus 2019. We sold a lot of seats, but we sold business travel seats accounted for 7 points down year-over-year and premium leisure comp traffic compensated for that by being up 7 points. So, it just to offset it, but that came at a lower yield. So, we are carefully also trying to keep increased premium leisure demand and revenue created since the pandemic while accommodating more and more of traditional business traffic.
