Originally Posted by spooldup

To add on to this, there was another caller who really layed into BB about their 3 years of meh/loss and questioned their return to profits and their direction..... He got REALLY defensive, it was towards the end.

Barclays: Hey, good morning everyone. Thanks for taking the question. And Barry, I ask this with the most respect, but I guess it’s been two or three years now where we’ve seen a clear divergence in profitability between those that maybe have transatlantic routes and those that don’t. But there’s a narrative that there’s a structural shift happening. I guess, what’s gonna change looking forward? Because you guys have a huge order book. You’re taking deliveries, yet shrinking capacity. So how do we reconcile the outlook here versus an order book and an industry that needs to shrink? And I guess, where do you fit into that? And how do we hit that ever elusive double digit pretax margin?

BB: Yeah. Look. I I don’t take offense. I mean, I didn’t buy wide bodies ten years ago, and maybe I’d love to have them. But I I think history shows that, you know, there’s there’s periods of time where international is really good.

I go back to late nineties. The legacies were minting money on international. It really helped, really helped. Their corporate was really good, and low cost actually underperformed. You flipped a few years later, well, those fortunes change.

I think what’s become clear, and we actually think the model is now vindicated, is this is not a model issue. If you go look under the hood, this is a domestic oversupply issue, period. And what we now see is that these larger carriers and small, in some cases, competitors will be reducing capacity in The United States. Full stop. And we then, with the lowest costs and one of the cleanest balance sheets, will be a huge beneficiary of that.