American Airlines Group Inc. (NASDAQ:AAL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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David Vernon: Hi. Good morning, guys. So Robert and Devon, first question for you on the guidance framework you kind of laying out for us here for the back half of the year. It does sort of imply a pretty material deceleration from your earnings level in 2Q to 3Q. And we’re hearing from you guys that the demand is good. The team is executing, you’re delivering on your cost performance. Can you talk a little bit about the thinking behind how you’re laying out the guidance here? You just had a huge beat to your 2Q guide. You haven’t missed in a couple of quarters. I’m just trying to understand like are you guys just kind of keeping the bar here where you said it in the beginning of the year, or is there something that’s really kind of decelerating here in the back half?

Robert Isom: David, thanks for the question. Look, we’ve set out clearly focused on producing profitability and our reliability as our operating reliability is actually really facilitated that. As we take a look at it over the course of the year, you’ll see that we actually raised the midpoint of our full year guide by a quarter. It’s indicative of our belief that the economy is strong, demand is strong. And for us, look, there’s seasonality certainly involved. But at the same time, we’re looking at this over the course of the year, and we’re going to stay the course, and we feel really positive about the results that we reported and what’s coming. And Devon, do you want to add anything to that?

Devon May: No, I think same points. We started the year and set our objectives for the capacity we’re going to produce, the unit costs we’re going to produce it at and our earnings levels. We’re really happy with what we’ve accomplished in the first half of the year. The guide we have in place did increase our full year EPS to [$3 to $3.75], and we feel really good about upping that number.

David Vernon: Okay. And then maybe if you could talk a little bit about sort of the domestic outlook here in the 3Q. You’ve got, I think, 34% capacity growth in domestic and short-haul international — how are fair trends kind of moving sequentially. There’s a lot of concern, I think, in the market about deceleration in the domestic travel market. Can you kind of elaborate a little bit more on kind of what you’re seeing and what you’re embedding into the 3Q guide for domestic?

Vasu Raja: Sure thing. This is Vasu. First, look, I’ll say at large. We continue to remain encouraged by the overall level of demand we see, especially in domestic and short haul. If you look at air travel spend as a percentage of GDP, certainly retained its relationship revenue, even domestic revenue as a percentage of GDP continue to regain their former relationship to demand. But for us, it’s really important to note is this recovery is continuing to unfold. And as we look out there in domestic, a lot of the sequential change that you see is really due to some pretty unique things. About a point of the 2Q to 3Q changes just due to calendar shift. And another point is due to our operational outperformance in the second quarter.

Everything else is really a return to normal seasonality. As far as a deceleration of demand or things like that, we don’t yet see it now. And in fact, when you look at it for us, like versus 2019 or some base where you lose just the strange comparisons to how recoveries have unfolded. For us, as we get into the fall, and we will be flying an airline has a date in the 2019 airline but producing short-haul RASMs that are 15% to 20% higher. There’s still — we’re still in a world where demand is very strong. The year-over-year comps are a little bit strange, owing more to just the vagaries of the recovery than anything underlying the business.

David Vernon: All right. Thank you for that.

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