Hawaiian Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:HA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Helane Becker: And then for my follow-up question, so you have 1 aircraft that started service for Amazon. And I’m just kind of wondering if you could talk about, it’s been what 2 weeks? Let’s talk about the performance and whether you’re going to in ’20 — I guess it would be 2025, right, break out how, break out that revenue line or include it in cargo and other revenue. I don’t know. How should we think about, like, parsing that out, if at all?

Peter Ingram: Yes. Well, let me start and then Shannon can follow-up or correct me if I get anything wrong here. In terms of the operating performance, we’re pleased how things have been going so far. It’s great to get into a place where, instead of just incurring startup costs and no revenue, we’re operating revenue flights and getting the business growing. Our on-time performance has been very good so far which is crucial in this arrangement. Part of the reason why we were sought out to bid for this work. So it’s great to be up and running. In terms of how it appears on the income statement, I’ll let Shannon go through it in more detail. But essentially, right now it’s not particularly material. And so we’re not breaking anything out. As it becomes more material over time, we’re going to look at the best way to break it out. And Shannon can talk about what things that we’re thinking about.

Shannon Okinaka: Yes. So for sure, Helane, it would be part of, other revenue but as it gets more material and right now we’re anticipating 2025, to your point, we actually move ourselves into segment reporting. And we haven’t quite finalized exactly how we define the segments but I would think that however we do the segment reporting, you should see more clearly what part of our direct revenues and costs are Amazon related. And we’ll have to do some allocations in that accounting as well but it will come through the segment reporting piece of our SEC reports.

Helane Becker: Okay. When you — just one other clarification question. When you report on Form 41 cargo volumes, will the Amazon volumes be included in that or are they separated?

Shannon Okinaka: I am going to have to follow-up with you on that question. Yes, we’ll follow-up with you.

Peter Ingram: And Helane, just circling back on your first question, I want to clarify one thing. The Lufthansa technique agreement is covering A321 and 330 components. It’s not 787. That’s a different contract for that one.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Chris Stathoulopoulos with Susquehanna International Group.

Chris Stathoulopoulos: So Peter, as we think about 2024, I know you’re still in your planning phase here but there’s a lot of moving pieces here with the 787, A330s, where Japan will be at that point with its recovery. So as we think about all that and stage, gauge and departures, any color of how we should think about capacity for next year as we put those pieces together?

Peter Ingram: Yes. Let me start and then hand it over to Brent. I think we will. We’ve got an opportunity for some growth next year. We’ve got, 787s coming throughout the year. I think we have at least 3 in service by the end of the year and a fourth one coming late in the year, so there will be some contribution from that. It’s — I would like to think that as we get fully into the year, we’re going to have all the 321s flying again. That’s obviously subject to discussions for the reasons we’ve talked about earlier but we do feel better, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, about the aircraft or the engine availability as we start getting some of those MR overturns. So we’re not going to be providing guidance at this time but we do see things growing as we have the annualization of bringing Japan back this year and then the incremental fleet availability coming into next year. So it does position it as a year for capacity growth for us.

Chris Stathoulopoulos: Okay. And as a follow-up, Shannon, I think you said on the 50% impact for 4Q, you actually gave a percent per ASM number there. And is that just on a larger capacity base? Does that include any productivity within the network? Just want to understand how we’re getting to that. I think it was 50% number by the end of 4Q of next year?

Shannon Okinaka: Yes, that was when I was talking about the pilot productivity and the number of excess pilots we have on property due to all of the training to get ready for the 787 deliveries and A230 freighters. So what it refers to is just that CASM impact from having that excess number of pilots versus 2019. And so we decreased that CASM impact by 50% from the end of ’23 to the end of ’24. So that’s what that referred to.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Dan McKenzie with Seaport Global.

Dan McKenzie: A couple questions here. I guess my first question is really a schedules versus a revenue question with respect to California. So I guess, just setting aside the Maui wildfires, it looks like San Francisco and Los Angeles are cities where flying has not yet recovered to 2019 levels. And so I guess, my question is, it seems like an important part of the network. And I’m wondering what’s holding the recovery back to these cities, from a network perspective. Is it a delay or is it structural in nature? And, if these cities could get back to a normal schedule, what would that possibly, what could that mean for revenue?

Brent Overbeek: Yes, Dan, frankly the scheduled cuts that we’ve had to make in terms of putting capacity back in are things that we’ve been really frustrated to do, frustrating for us financially, frustrating for our guests and are really almost exclusively related to A321 availability. And so where we’ve had to make some reductions, particularly in the Bay Area, these haven’t been things that we wanted to do and we were going to have to temporarily suspend Long Beach, Maui for a period this winter. Not something we want to do but really kind of given where we’re at with the Pratt situation are things that are really necessitated more than anything by that. If we look kind of in terms of kind of industry recovery of — kind of California versus other metros, I’d say the Bay Area is maybe a little behind the basin and Seattle and kind of other big metros but not material as we look out at kind of industry volumes and particularly like looking at second quarter DOT data, maybe it’s a percentage point or 2 behind some of the other metros in the Bay but overall, I would say just a little bit slower.

Peter Ingram: And just to follow-up on that, Dan, I mean, California is a super important market for us, Los Angeles is the biggest concentration of our flying outside of the Hawaiian Islands. If you look at what we’ve done since pre-pandemic, some of the flying we added in 2020 coming out of the pandemic were things like Long Beach to Maui and adding our flight to Ontario which weren’t there before that time period. So, we’re really again, once we have a full availability of our A321 fleet, I think if you looked at our flying 2019 versus what we’d like to be flying now, we’d be flying more, not less to California.

Dan McKenzie: Okay. And then, I guess, Peter, can you remind us of what percent of the bookings were sold through blocks with the travel, Japanese travel agencies say in 2019? And just, what is the expectation, going forward? And what could that possibly mean for revenue?