Looks like the earnings are out...

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives...n-20250630.htm

70m loss. RASM down $0.20 to almost $9.00 flat. CASM (excluding fuel) 7.50 up from in 2024 6.24 .

Passengers (thousands) 8,499 in 2025 vs 2024 8,899 Load factors were actually up about 1% YOY, to close to 80%.

It is true there was a huge demand dip with tarriffs and uncertainty a few months ago for those 3 or so weeks, but we will see how the next earnings call fares since it will not include that big dip and only include the "surge and revenge of the travelers" per bb.

 

Travel demand was down this spring and summer industry wide. Ticket prices were down and we simply didn't bring in enough revenue.

In the low demand market, we lower ticket prices to keep the load factors up (which we did) but the prices were too low.

Not great, but not a crisis either.

 

Agree.... Our numbers weren't great, but they were also because we lost about 500k passengers in the quarter which obviously will reduce the revenue, likely due to the economic issues we have seen and will continue to see due to the current president and his whiplash of proposals and tarriffs. It sucks to see a loss, but seeing these load factors checks out, my flying then was pretty half ful to 80% full planes. Compared to the last month, I have had nothing but near full or oversold every leg.

 

There is nothing at this point that shows the airline on track to being profitable in the future. The legacies have the airline beat on almost every level. Wouldn’t doubt frontier is on the same track, just behind spirit in this case. I wonder what the plan is toward becoming profitable because every plan that has been tried has fallen short. No guidance has been given on that.

 

No it is not. Stop defending management's poor management. Spirit and JetBlue have cut routes and are bleeding wounded animals.

Premium, affluent travelers are happy to spend money and travel. Wal-Mart shoppers are not.

Guess who we are. Guess who we can't capture? we don't even have Wi-Fi.

Management still can't deliver.

https://www.travelandtourworld.com/n...he-new-update/

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/22/summ...on-planes.html

 

Coming from a general optimistic person about this place this is definitely a crisis. These are very very bad results and context matters.

We were supposed to be double digit positive margins this summer now we are double digit negative. We posted this terrible of results without a pilot or FA contract in place. Add those costs and you have a REAL problem. We posted this terrible of a performance this summer despite flying 10-15% less per plane and pilot. We should have truly been an on time machine this summer but we were the worst again. We are seeing that the passengers don’t flow down to Frontier if they can’t afford legacies, they just don’t fly. We are needlessly burning through money that should be being used to improve every aspect of our operation. The relentless focus on costs has cost us millions in revenue.

This is definitely a crisis and an awful result.

 

Barry:

almost exact quote or 99% version

"We are not planning on an improvement of demand to improve profitability"

My opinion: Get ready for early-outs and other leave programs

 

Here we go First words (quick TLDL for what I could furiously type)

- atc issues ( Obv we know EWR was an issue)
- Wx issues

-Cardholder spend up 20% YoY

-2026 strong profitability is expected

- Fleetwide installation for first class is planned to be completed by mid spring.

- More upfront Plus seats installed

-New IOS and android apps

-New redesigned website coming out this year

- Focus on increasing commercial to focus on premium offerings

- 766m total liquidity, 560m cash.

- financing for more liquidity approved by year end to improve our 760m to close to 1b

- 13 aircraft deliveries in the next 6 months. 2 in Q3, 11 in Q4.

- Q3 adjusted loss is expected

- Higher than expected Mx costs in Q2 (wonder why...)



Q&As

- Barry, what is your path to positive margins? - Underlying issues, april - tariffs and economy, stabilized, now we are seeing more ATC issues and Wx issues. Mid june, another slow down, cant tell if demand or slowdown for summer. low bookings, but now we are seeing significant growth on sales for july/august. It is actually closer to break even on a month to month basis. Sept alone, F9 is seeing a lot of markets growing and a certain carrier losing seats on those routes. Capacity reductions are there to increase RASM on overcapped routes. Product and loyalty are being focused on, spending is up on cards and the new frontier is actually doing well with customers. Premium offerings are continuing and hopeful that it will increase profitability.

- Cost side, What is your capacity looking like in Q4 and utilization of aircraft along with CASMex? - Tues/wed/sat reductions. driving YoY flat capacity. Hiring is slow and tied to capacity reductions. Most of our aircraft were staggered towards Year end and expect see more flights towards end of the year and Q1 next year.

-How can you flex so much so easily? We sit on a surplus of pilots YoY with the ability to draw up and draw down very easily. Activating our training program to increase capacity will happen when needed. Carrying several points this quarter based on excess pilots and flight attendants. Too many staffed right now due to larger growth plans that fell short. We are not going to be hiring and adding to the problem right now, but we are increasing peak flying with new aircraft deliveries. Long pull on tent to increase growth is training pilots. When we see demand come back, we will start hiring 2 quarters prior to forecast. We are currently not seeing demand come back as much as we would like, so we are sticking to our current staffing levels.

- Load factors are consistently high 80s low 90s the last month and continuing. Revenue per passenger is actually increasing a fair amount and capacity is down, but sales are moving up.

- Better markets than others? -LAS having challenges. Everywhere else is actually doing very well.

- August yield up 5%, september yields up 15%. Which explains our current range of Q3 expectations. Dip in June they didn't expect due to Gaza/israel. Currently in a month to month game. Barry is mostly optimistic of seeing the benefits of capacity issues and competition and capacity/demand will right size soon.

-Domestic capcity losing money? is this ULCC Specific? - Everyone is losing domestic domestically. 2 carriers are subsidizing it heavily with intl travel and codeshares. History shows it will not continue. We have one of the cleanest balance sheets in the industry and there is still a huge opportunity for lowest cost provider. Domestically there are too many narrow bodies for capacity.

- Capacity this year will be flat to down YoY. It will be an unprofitable year, do you think pieces are there to make this model work? or will it require growth? - The model doesn't need growth, it will work better with growth. Prior to the economic issues in Feb, we were up 20% YoY for yields. Since then, it has been up and down each month. We believe domestic flying for everyone is not producing positive margins today. Too much supply compared to demand. Industry will react and right size.

-If we are seeing big improvements in sept/oct, why are we not seeing higher earnings in Q3? Sales were down in June/July actually YoY and Aug/Sept are both strong. We are seeing sales up, mid july until now, sales are up YoY. If these continue, we expect high RASMs in the future and a great rest of the year.

-We are seeing railroad consilidations and mergers. Do you think it is time to revisit M&A? - I do not know - Barry. - If you look in history and we are seeing it, reductions in capacity, we then see consolidation.

-Do you still expect profitable back half? Yes, Year started fantastic, issues in spring, recovered in late spring, then fell in mid june until mid july. We are currently back seeing high sales, to see yields up 15% now is amazing. If they continue, then we will see profits. But this year is currently very volatile.

-Barry, back to load factor, 2nd quarter trended higher. Do you see progression monthly throughout quarter, or was it back half weighted, especially after competitor bag fee policies? - It improved on the back half. Late may/early June we booked to a 94 for the first time in a long time on a non holiday. There is a demand for the product we currently offer. Thew new frontier offering basic, economy and a more premium product are leveling the playing field and increasing demand for our products.

- We are seeing lower utilization with higher demand on peak days and increased flying. Those are cuts to excess capacity that were causing us losses.

- I ask with the most respect. We have seen profitability fare divergence the last 3 years. Tehre is a narrative about trans atlantic. You have an order book and shrinking capacity. Where do you fit in and where do we see these double pre tax margins?- Yeah look, I didnt buy widebodies some years ago and I would love to have them. there are periods where intl is really good and others where low cost performed well and domestic performed well. It has become clear that this model is vindicated, it isn't a model issue, it is a domestic oversupply issue. period. Larger and small carriers will be reducing capacity in the united states full stop. We have the best balance sheets and lowest cost. We expect to be the winner in 2026. It is always dark before the storm. History shows you will not see oversupply for a long period of time.

- I appreciate that answer, but is there a mature travel demand in the US and do you have strategies if it doesnt work? - Moves by others that are precoursers for potential consolidation. There are places we aren't flying. There are places with ULCCs that are untapped and we believe we still have voids in our growth that will be getting better. Everyone is chasing margins and we think we will see a spot to increase our fares soon too.

- Barry, what are the themes on sale leasebacks and competitive issues with that? As prodution increased and there are more transactions to get done, do you see lessors having a better end of the deal instead of the airlines? - Plenty of other airlines who buy what we buy. We are always concerned about seeing issues with sale leasebacks in the future, we stay about 12-24 months infront of the airline and currently dont see a challenge with any sale leasebacks currently. There might be a bank that would flip and help us with financing should we need that instead of sale leasebacks. We stay ahead of everything and have the lowest cost of aircraft ownership in the industry, whatever is needed to achieve that, we will keep it. The current issues are values of end of life aircraft that are nearing 17 or so years.

- You said you could report by month, what is keeping you from disclosing monthly RASM? - it used to be a thing, we have thought about it and it could possibly cause other volatile issues. But we do not want an overreaction up or down. We are cautiously optimistic. We are staring at double digit yields currently and we are hopeful. Finally seeing the industry figured out that 79 is the new 49. We ran a sale and dropped fares, sales stayed the same. $29 fares do not work anymore. You need to increase fares and cannot make up the low prices in volume. As we clean up capacity we will clean up pricing as well.

- Thanks for telling us about domestic market demand. How are you thinking about peak/off peak capacity? We are down on tues/wed, going into fall we plan on 2-3hrs on those days, not quite allegiant levels, but we have seen losses on Tues/wed and in order to cut those losses, we are trying to lower more. It might be too much, but when we can fill aircraft on those days, we will add more. We are going to match capacity to demand and get back to profitability. Flying max on peak days, drawing back on off peak days. We need to find the balance on where it needs to be, might take a few quarters to dial in, we are south of 7-8hrs but north of 3-4 hours. We will likely see about 5hrs in the end. Due to fleet order, we will grow, it will be on peak days and peak parts of year to ensure capacity and cash positive outcomes.

- April was some of the lowest load factors siunce covid. June to now is some of the highest loads we have seen. Those translate in higher yields. We expect to see the benefits in this Q4.

- I get the confidence on your plans, but do you see a world where it takes longer to play out and domestic leisure is down, what do you think? - We are currently to best positioned in the low cost space to weather whatever is going to happen in the next year. We are optimistic.

 

My takeaways of the call

Moving out of "new capacity markets"
By slowing overall growth rate = RASM growth improves
Spring 2026: "full rollout" of First Class seating
Less capacity in overall industry is expected in the future
Planning on lower utilization on off-peak days
Surplus of Pilots, FA's
No hiring planned
Need to "right size" staffing
Not planning on an improvement of demand for a return to profitability
Gaza violence / middle east conflict impacted June
"Huge opportunity for low cost provider"
Tuesday, Wed flying will be reduced greatly
"you gotta get full to drive yields"

 

That's about what I got out of it as well except that I did catch that they already have the financing in place for all the orders thru 2026. So the planes are definitely still coming, we just aren't going to fly them very much.