Ravi Shanker: Scott, thanks for that kind of early intro to the call, pretty extraordinary set of kind of facts, an argument you laid out there. What does this mean for the industry kind of longer term? Kind of it’s really unusual to see an industry, to your point, try to grow in the face of the restrictions that they have like this? I mean, how does this end? I mean, do you think there’s going to be like regulatory scrutiny on kind of airlines trying to grow when they can’t, and that’s hurting service, or what happens next here?
Scott Kirby: Well, I think what it’s going to lead to one way or another is less capacity. You just — it’s not mathematically possible for all the airlines to achieve their aspirations. And now, I’ll just give you the data. I’m not trying to pick on these two airlines. But, like this seems so blindingly obvious to me. And we talked about it a year ago, we were right all this year with capacity coming in 7 points lower, and I feel even more confident that we’re right today. And the data I’ll give you is snowstorm started — pretty big sandstorm started in Denver yesterday afternoon and it continued through this morning, 11 inches of snow. So, that’s a tough operating environment. There are 3 large airlines — there’s 3 airlines, so 2 in addition to United have big operations there.
Yesterday in Denver and our mainline, we had a 100% completion factor, so no cancellation. canceled 12% of their flights, the other one canceled 27% of their flights. Starting off today, we’ve canceled a little less than 1%. Each of them have canceled 33% of their flights, like this isn’t new. And there’s like a dozen of the Wall Street analysts that breathlessly publish a weekly report on industry scheduled capacity. You guys are looking at the wrong data. If you want a forward indicator of what’s going to happen with capacity, you should watch completion factor. One of you should start looking at completion factor because airlines that are running like that, it means they can’t fly their schedule, and they’re going to have to adjust one way or another.
That’s my thesis. That’s what happened last year, is what I think is going to happen next year. And all of the structural issues are multiyear — I mean all of them are 3 years at best to address. And you put all of them together, this is a long-term structural issue. And I think, it challenges us too, but we just did more to invest for that future, saw coming earlier than others and are better prepared to deal with than everyone else. But it does challenge us too. But really like don’t take my word for it, don’t take the others word for it, just watch the data. That’s what’s happening with completion factors, and that’s going to tell you whether we’re right again this year or everyone else is right when they say they’re going to achieve the aspirations.
Ravi Shanker: Great. Thanks, Scott. I think, you can be a good sell-side analyst when you decide to do something else at some point in the future.
Scott Kirby: I can’t do sell-side. You guys are way too negative. I’m too optimistic to be sell-sider.
Ravi Shanker: Just maybe one follow-up. I think the point on corporates running out of budgets towards the end of last year was an interesting point. Do you guys have much data on kind of what €˜23 corporate budgets look like to avoid a similar situation this year? Thank you.
