FWIW, here's the actual Q & A from the investor call:
Hunter Keay
So Scott, you said that Denver is your most profitable hub, obviously it looks like Frontier has announced a pretty big growth push there with the - I think they’ve called it natural share.
I’d be curious to have sort of your early take away of what that means for you guys there and if you care to talk about how you might deploy basic economy that means just fee, that is just sort of the first sort of like production test of that product or just any broad thoughts would be appreciated.
Thank you.
Scott Kirby
Sure, thanks Hunter. In the near to medium term, anytime we have capacity growth from anyone but particular a low cost carrier it’s going to lead to some pricing pressure. Over the longer term however I view this really having watched the ULCC growth over the last decade this is the best news that I’ve heard in the last ten years. I have known and look, what they said is, they’re going to run a connecting hub-and-spoke network in Denver. The model that they used to have which led them to bankruptcy, but they’re pivoting from what has been the most successful models, point to point ULCC strategy around the world to going back to trying to copy what the network carriers do and run it connecting business model.
And the reason I view that is that best thing that has happened in the last decade is because I believe for many years that the ULCC business model can’t work when a network carrier decides to compete on price and particularly once we’ve been able to roll out based economy. And while I believe that for a long time this is the first I guess public validation that one of the ULCCs is throwing in the towel on the point-to-point business model and switching to a network model. And look that’s a lot more complicated. It's one thing to run a point-to-point network, but when you're trying to run connecting traffic, you got to slow down the aircraft utilization because you got to wait for passengers and employees to connect and airplanes to be timed correctly.
You got to staff up, because you have peaks and valleys, you got to connect bags, which is one of the most operationally difficult thing we do. Today if Frontier has a flight from Orlando to Denver and it’s delayed by two hours, all they have to do is run the flight two hours, but the customers still get there and it’s not a good experience, but it’s not the end of the world. Tomorrow when they’d have half the people in that airplane that are connecting, if that flight is two hours late, their choice and they got one flight a day to all these markets, do we delay everything else for the rest of the day by two hours or do we have half the people on that airplane go to a hotel and spend the night or do we buy [indiscernible] half of the people in that airplane tickets on United to get them to their destination that day.
It is exponentially more complex to run a connecting model. And for Frontier to publically acknowledge that the old business model has run out of growth opportunities in the middle of an IPO process I just view as a phenomenal validation of everything we've done has worked and our ability to compete and win against them. And I can promise you they’re not competing on our turf and trying to get a network carrier in Denver, that is a battle I guarantee United will win.