There are lots of puts and takes with this given our load factors, but we do think that there is potential to get this done, particularly as we continue to integrate the new 737s, which come into our fleet with a large amount of premium seating. Most of our growth is tilted towards premium seating at this point, particularly as we retire the single class regional jets from the network. And so I will say that I think we are just hitting on all cylinders on this front and the progress we are seeing in Polaris in particular, with higher load factors, backfilling temporarily lease or premium leisure. And ultimately, as long-haul business traffic, as I said earlier, some of it back, faster, we were optimistic that we are going to get Polaris completely back to where it was in terms of relative profitability margin later this year.Sheila Kahyaoglu Great.
Thank you.Operator The next question comes from Scott Group from Wolfe Research. Your line is un-muted. Please go ahead.Scott Group Hey. Thanks. Good morning. So, when I look at domestic capacity for the second quarter, it’s back below 2019 levels. It’s only up marginally from Q1, which is a lot less than normal. I guess is this that – when you go back to the plan from the beginning of the year, is this a change in how you are thinking about domestic capacity? Is this a sort of a one-off quarter, or is this more of a multi-quarter, more prolonged view of domestic capacity?Scott Kirby I do think it is a little bit lower than Q1. I think you are absolutely correct on that. It’s where the numbers shook out. We clearly leaned as hard as we could, as quickly as we could into global long haul, which really turns on in March and April, and that’s what shook out for domestic because we thought that was the best place to put the capacity.
But you should see a little bit more domestic ASM growth in the second half than what we are seeing in the second quarter.Scott Group Okay. And then I know it’s early. You talked about next year, another focus on mainline gates. Any early preliminary thoughts on how you are thinking about overall capacity growth in ‘24?Scott Kirby I don’t think we are prepared to give our guidance for ‘24. We are excited to continue implementing the United Next. And most importantly, for domestic or excited to make sure that we rebuild the connectivity as quickly as we can back to where we were pre-pandemic. And I think that’s our biggest driver of domestic RASM next year and that’s really all I can say at this point.Scott Group Thank you.Operator The next question comes from David Vernon from Bernstein.
Your line is un-muted. Please go ahead.David Vernon Hey. Thanks guys and thanks for fitting me in here. Two questions for you guys on the new seasonality. Andrew, can you maybe talk a little bit more about some of the short-term challenges and opportunities you are dealing with from the revenue management perspective, things like overbooking and how you are sort of managing yields with this, this sort of shift in customer behavior, which seems relatively new? And then, Scott, I would love to get your long-term perspective on what do you think United might need to do a little bit differently if we are going to be relying more on the leisure market, things like do you still get the same bang for the buck out of like a Polaris launch, for example, if this shift continues longer term?
Thank you.Andrew Nocella Sure. What I would say is the booking curves have adjusted. They are both international and domestic are booking further out, the international more extreme than domestic. And so we are – RM systems have adjusted for this very, very quickly, and we are booked ahead in our global long-haul system based on the change in the booking curve. Domestic has also moved out. There is I think 4 points greater outside of 21 days and there is inside of 21 days right now. And again, RM systems have adjusted for that. That being said, we are managing to keep yield domestically as close as possible to where we were last year. And as we look at this, we expect we are going to run lower load factors in our domestic entity in Q2 as a result.
That’s part of our plan. We think it’s the right strategy. And we do think we will be able to fill up some of these seats were closer in higher yield in business. And the back that business has had significant recent recovery in the last two weeks makes me even more bullish that we have executed the right strategy there and that we do have capacity available to accommodate closer in business demand to the extent it materializes in Q2.Scott Kirby And on the longer term, it’s an interesting question. First, I wouldn’t conclude that business – we will see what happens with business demand. In the near-term, though the most obvious things we can do are the things that are happening in revenue management. Andrew talked about we have the best revenue management system and team in the industry, that is true.
We made huge investments coming into the pandemic included it during the pandemic. And our team is just really like none of these things, they are generally not that surprising. We didn’t really appreciate fully seasonality shift, but the revenue management system is working well. And that’s one of the obvious places Andrew talked also about pivoting the network. It’s another one that straightforward things to do, fly more to Florida, more leisure destinations. In terms of things like Polaris Class, Andrew also talked about the fact that while we have less business traffic flying internationally, we have a lot more premium leisure. So, I wouldn’t anticipate, at least in the near term, any radical shifts in the strategy and mostly probably come in terms of capacity deployment, more than anything which one could have fungible assets, that’s relatively easy for us to do.Operator We will now switch to the media portion of the call.
[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Claire Buchi [ph]. Your line is un-muted. Please go ahead.Unidentified Analyst Hi. I wanted to ask about summer operations. You mentioned cutting flights in New York earlier in the call. I wanted to ask about what other operational changes United is making this summer to avoid a repeat of the disruptions of last summer?Torbjorn Enqvist Hey Claire, this is Toby. Well, we have done a lot. Let’s talk about Newark and New York first. So, we work with the FAA. FAA gave us a waiver for the summer. So, we are down about 30 flights per day in Newark and at peak times that’s going to make a big difference. Also, like Andrew said, we are not the only one. So, for the first time in a long while in New York, we actually will be scheduled to on a blue sky day, at least what the capacity of the airport can actually hold.
So, we are really bullish on that. And on top of that, and Andrew mentioned this in his remarks as well, we are actually going to have 17 new normal mainline gates in the brand-new terminal in New York. And if you guys haven’t been there, it’s a fantastic terminal. I mean it’s a world-class terminal replacing a 1969 [indiscernible] terminal that we were in last year. So, just right up the bat right there, that’s going to be a huge improvement. The other thing – again, United actually did, if you guys remember, we actually did pretty well last year, last summer. I think the biggest issues we had was actually the infrastructure, especially in the Transatlantic. And now actually, we are just in Europe two weeks ago and talked to our biggest Air Force there Heathrow, Frankfurt and Munich.
And they are 1 year ahead of all the hiring and all the other things there. So, again, it’s summer, it’s peaked up. It’s not going to be perfect, but we are in a much, much, much better place than we were last year and we visited, I mean all the terminals in Europe is actually open this year. We had large traffic terminals in Europe last year, both in Amsterdam and Heathrow and others that were even open, and they are wide open and open for business this year. So, we are – again, we are – we call it summer readiness. We are not taking it lightly. Summer is our Super Bowl, is the toughest time to operate. It’s going to have some tough base really with weather and things, but we are going to be in a much, much better place than we were last year.Unidentified Analyst I just – Delta said that they were flying less than they had expected.
They were trying to reduce the turnaround time for maintenance on aircraft. Is there just any of that detail that you can share with us?Torbjorn Enqvist Well, I would just – I will take that, too. We have already done that. So, when we talk about we are not building our own like it’s 2019, we built those buffers in prospectively and in advance. And that’s why we ran the best operation in the country because we were ahead of the curve. And perhaps others are catching up to that, but we were ahead of that curve, and that’s what led to the best operation in the country in the first quarter.Unidentified Analyst Thank you.Operator Our next question comes from Leslie Josephs. Your line is un-muted. Please go ahead.Leslie Josephs Hi. Thanks for taking my questions.
Just curious on the retrofits, how many of those do you expect to get this year and how many were you expecting before? And what was the outlook for 2024? And then it’s been almost 7 years since you have launched Polaris and just curious if you are and how are you thinking about kind of the successor to that?Scott Kirby Okay. That’s a good question, and I will not answer the latter question other than the teams are always working on innovations at United across all of our business functions. And I am sure somebody somewhere is working on something great when it comes to seats and we will leave it at that. In regards to retrofits, and I don’t have the numbers here. We will have somebody call you back. But the reality is the supply challenges across the board whether it would be IFE systems, chips, seats and many other things are just more challenging than they have ever been in our business.
And while we converted our first A319 a few weeks, it should be flying hopefully, any day now in the new interior, and we have multiple lines that we will be doing this summer. So, you will see a rapid increase in the number of aircraft with the signature interior through retrofits and through new aircraft. The total time to convert all the aircraft is just going to be longer than we expected, unfortunately, probably by a year or 2 years, to be frank. So, we will get there. It will just take a little bit longer than we had originally intended. But you will see material progress. We will get some of the numbers out to you separately by the end of this year.Leslie Josephs And do you expect that to hurt your revenue premium at all for people that are booking up or choosing United because it has those features?Scott Kirby No, what I would tell you is that the increasing of getting on an aircraft, the United signature interior is going to go up rapidly.
