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Recorded at CAPA Americas Aviation Summit, 11-12 Apr 2016

Allegiant Travel Company Update

Allegiant Travel Company SVP Planning and COO Jude Bricker discusses the company’s continuing expansion into medium sized markets and current pricing trends.

Transcript

Jude Bricker:Well, the results speak for themselves. I mean, a big part of our growth over the last 2 years has been markets like Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Memphis, Austin, you know, markets with over a million people, which before Cincinnati hadn't been really much of what we do. But because of consolidation in the network carrier space, A lot of those markets have been deserted, and we're moving into backfill for at least for the leisure customers. That's been great. Yeah. Most of the pricing weakness we're seeing is driven either by easily explainable exogenous influences on the business or by us just adding more capacity. And it's a rational thing to do in today's environment where fuel's gone down so much. You add more capacity, drive down fares, but you're making more money at the end of the day. On the external effects of the company, you know we've been dependent on. cross-border traffic from Canada and Mexico in years past. It's a smaller part of what we do today, but that segment of passengers has been really affected by a strong dollar, and there's some weakness there. We also get some regional weakness associated with oil and gas communities, but overall, this is some of the best of times. Now, we're still expanding off-peak opportunities, and that's gonna be primarily a result of 2 factors. One is lower fuel prices, so the break-even fare is much lower today than it's been in the past. And secondly, a long-term migration to an all-A320 fleet, which has a lower variable cost of operation. So off-peak periods will become more and more of what we do. That being said, we're always going to be a peak carrier because we're always going to focus, you know, always maybe the next 5 years focus on leisure carriers, leisure customers. And as a result, they all want to fly at the same time. So we're going to continue to sculpt our schedule around demand patterns. which will drive peakiness into our schedule. So what we're talking about is changing on the margin. Somewhat more frequently we'll fly on Tuesdays, somewhat more frequently we'll fly in September, things like that. Thank you.

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