Originally Posted by
JetBlueFA
I was never good at reading earning calls, hence why i'm a flight attendant
But we have been raising our fares over the past few years, so wouldn't that also account for the decrease in loads? If i'm not mistaken hasn't our RASM continued to increase over the last years?
I'm all for raising fares, but at some point you reach the crossover where further fare hikes have a negative impact. Perhaps B6 has reached that point? RASM increased in the first quarter, and some of that is because there were fewer seats across which to spread the revenue. '
Yield was up an impressive amount, but it remains to be seen how many more fare hikes the market will absorb. If there's still lots of money on the table, then great!
Originally Posted by JetBlueFA
So for the first quarter we had a pre tax loss of $45million. We blew through $32million during the 2 ice storms. So that would have left is with about a $13million loss for the first quarter which could be associated to the cabin reconfigurations. If I remember correctly we had stated we where going to post a loss for the first quarter because of the one time costs with the cabin reconfigurations. Am I about right with my math here or totally off base?
I recall the earlier announcements that the storms cost B6 about $30 million of revenue. If the storms accounted for $32 million of revenue loss, that's 5% of the revenue for the quarter, or the equivalent of 4.5 days of revenue.
I doubt the storms caused a $32 million hit to profits, but maybe they did. For comparison, AA estimated that the winter weather reduced revenue by approx. $60 million, or just over 1% of total revenue.
The seat removal shouldn't have cost $13 million, although that might help explain the 24% bump in wage expense on just 2.4% more employees. AA estimated that MRTC (removal of two rows on over 700 aircraft, including a couple hundred widebodies) cost about $72 million, mostly in overtime. Removal of one row on about 100 airplanes should have been much cheaper.
I'm not an accountant, but cabin reconfigurations should be one-time expenses subject to special item treatment (as you mentioned - a one-time expense). Wonder why B6 didn't account for them as special items? I'll do some more digging on that one.