Earnings Labs

Southwest Airlines Co. (LUV)

Q2 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Jul 21, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Southwest Airlines' Second Quarter 2016 Conference Call. My name is Tom and I'll be moderating today's call. This call is being recorded and a replay will be available on Southwest.com in the Investor Relations section. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Ms. Marcy Brand, Managing Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Marcy Brand - Managing Director-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to today's call to discuss our second quarter 2016 results. Joining the call today, we have Gary Kelly, Chairman, President and CEO; Tammy Romo, Executive Vice President and CFO; Bob Jordan, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer; and Mike Van de Ven, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. Please note today's call will include forward-looking statements, because these statements are based on the company's current intent, expectations and projections, they are not guarantees of future performance, and a variety of factors could cause actual results to differ materially. As this call will include references to non-GAAP results excluding special items, please reference this morning's press release in the Investor Relations section at Southwest.com for further information regarding forward-looking statements and reconciliations of non-GAAP results to GAAP results. Following the prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow up, so that we can accommodate as many questions as possible. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Gary for opening remarks. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you, Marcy, and good morning everyone and thank you for joining our second quarter 2016 earnings call. As we speak, we are recovering from a system-wide Southwest technology outage that occurred yesterday about 1 PM, there was a network equipment failure and the planned redundancy or backup failed as well, and this hindered the recovery efforts, and especially with some of our older legacy systems. Ultimately, the network was virtually fully recovered and restored around 12 hours later, roughly 1 AM or 2 AM this morning. And since then, the operation and that is airplanes and flight crews and customer re-accommodations have been working…

Operator

Operator

Thank you, ma'am. And thank you for waiting. We'll begin with our first question from Michael Linenberg with Deutsche Bank.

Mike J. Linenberg - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Hey, Gary, I appreciate your comments about 2017, I think you said you're monitoring the situation closely and obviously trying to determine what the right amount of capacity growth will be for next year. But when I look at sort of the guidance for the latter part of 2016, I think fuel's going to be up year-over-year, CASM's going to be up and it also looks like RASM could be down a bit. Why no change or move away from the 5% to 6% growth for this year? I mean is it a systems issue that you can't change the schedule for the latter part of 2016, or what's holding you up, or maybe preventing that, any color, your thoughts on that that'd be great? Thanks. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, and sure Mike, and a very logical question, one that we know that we're going to get from you all here today. We're different than the industry. So, we don't publish 330 days' worth of inventory and the other aspect of the – our competitors' approach is they mostly over-schedule. So, they'll publish more, they'll claw that back and we just don't use that technique as you know. We don't publish as much inventory and what we do publish we very much intend to fly. So, we rarely go out into a published schedule and make changes. It is easier for us to hold a few flights in reserve and then publish them later, as opposed to taking flights out and re-accommodating customers. So, it is a – I don't know if it's so much a philosophy, but it is certainly a practice that we've used. The modeling that we've been – and second, the trends that we are…

Mike J. Linenberg - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

That's very helpful. When does that next schedule roll out? What's the next schedule rollout date for you guys? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Bob, what are you working on right now? Robert E. Jordan - Chief Commercial Officer & Executive VP: We're working on the basically the spring break – post-spring break period, and that'll be published here in the next couple of months.

Mike J. Linenberg - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Deutsche Bank

Okay. All right. Very helpful. Thanks, Gary. Thanks, Bob.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Julie Yates with Credit Suisse. J. Yates - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Tammy, what does your 3% to 4% guidance assume as we enter the shoulder periods? One of the other carriers gave guidance that assumes some improvement in September. Are you also assuming a similar improvement or are you more cautious as we enter into shoulder periods, I know a lot of these changes have been rather recent but just trying to figure out what your base case is in the down 3% to down 4%? Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Sure, Julie. Yeah, as we look forward, September does look to be a little bit easier comparison. But what our current forecast represents is really just a continuation of the trends that we're seeing here more recently. So, as we updated you at Investor Day, we knew our year-over-year comparisons were going to be difficult here in the second half, simply because of the lapse of the Chase agreements, but we have factored in the recent softening that we've seen particularly in our close-in bookings. So, we've – it's our best guess on our current trends, and obviously, we'll keep you updated as we move along here in the quarter. J. Yates - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Okay. And is there a tailwind from developing markets in the third quarter guidance or has that lapped at this point? Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: It's lapped largely simply because we're getting back down to a more normal percentage of development market as a percentage of ASMs. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: But year-over-year, yes, the developing markets…

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Duane Pfennigwerth with Evercore.

Duane Pfennigwerth - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Evercore

Hey, thanks for the question. So mine is real simple, can you give us a sense today for quite simply how you're going to grow, what the growth rate is in 2017 or even in the first quarter, as we try and model revenue and perhaps a recovery from this softer spot? What should we be punching into models for next year? Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: What I can give you right now to help you out is what we have through what we've got published with our schedules. So we are currently published through early March next year and our scheduled ASMs are up in probably the 6% range, and February I think is up a couple of percent for February. So that's where we are and as Gary indicated earlier, we're in the process of evaluating beyond that period. So I just don't have a forecast to give you beyond what's out there in the published schedule.

Duane Pfennigwerth - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Evercore

Okay. How about the latest on when you park these Classics, what date should we assume for that and what is the – I guess, we'll hang around the basket and wait for you to publish at least a full first quarter, but how should we be thinking about the cadence quarterly from that point forward? Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: We'll be retiring our Classics fleet here, as you know, between now and October 1, 2017. So – and as we described earlier, we'll be down to a manageable number of Classic and you can think of it as those being all out of our fleet by our fourth quarter schedule. So, we're still working through all of the details on that.

Duane Pfennigwerth - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Evercore

So would ASM growth be higher or lower for 2Q, 3Q, and 4Q than this mid-singles rate that we're at now? Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Well, all else being equal, just simply because of the fleet, you would expect that to go down now. Again, Duane, we're just working through all of the details for next year's schedule. So, as we sit here today, I'm just not in a position to give you exact year-over-year ASM guidance for next year. But as we go through the year and as we work through the Classics, particularly in the second half, all else being equal, you would expect that to bend down.

Duane Pfennigwerth - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Evercore

Okay. And if we think about how Southwest revenue might hold up in a downturn, obviously there's a lot of data from prior cycles, but are you more of a corporate carrier, more reliant on that close-in customer today, given all the progress that you've made on that side of the business, than maybe prior downturns? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: I don't think so. What's interesting is, if you go back 20 years, we were, as you know, such a short-haul carrier. And I think what a lot of people misunderstood back in the 1990s is how much business travel we had, and some of that again was very natural with the short-haul orientation we had with high frequencies, those were convenient schedules that were built for business customers. So I don't – if anything, I'll bet you that we're less reliant on business customers today than we were 20 years ago. Business travel, as you know, is very sensitive to the cycle, and – if that's where you're going with your question. The other tool that we have today to help manage through softer periods is we just have better connecting capabilities, and a lot higher load factors today than we did 20 years ago. So, I still think that we're very well positioned for a change in the cycle. I think we're obviously a low-cost producer, and have a low-fare brand, we have a very loyal brand, and people do travel during recessions, they just look for more bargains. So, generally that's worked very well in our favor in the past.

Duane Pfennigwerth - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Evercore

Thanks, Gary, for those thoughts. I mean, do you think that's where we are or is this industry dysfunction on pricing? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Oh, I was just trying to be responsive to your question. No, I don't think that's where we are. I think GDP growth is pretty steady. It's – you all know all the macros, real GDP is 2%-plus and domestic industry seats are up closer to 5%. So, I think that's not anything new, we've been talking about that for quite some time. And as I mentioned in my remarks, I don't think it's shocking that we find this sort of ebbs and flows of fares. But right now, it's – we are at a spot where, in particular with the close-in pricing, fares are softer than what we were expecting.

Duane Pfennigwerth - Evercore ISI

Analyst · Evercore

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Jack Atkins with Stephens.

Jack Atkins - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst · Stephens

Hey, good afternoon. You spoke earlier about the expectation to get back to positive RASM, or the hope, I should say, to get back to positive RASM in the fourth quarter. Can you speak to what you're seeing perhaps in your forward bookings and the potential revenue levers that you all have that could allow that to happen? Just sort of curious of the puts and takes there. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. I'm glad you asked me the question. So, let me try to make sure that I'm being clear. I am not predicting positive RASM, I'm not remotely suggesting that, that is a possibility based on what we're seeing right now. I'm simply acknowledging to you all that that is our goal, that was our goal for the year and we're falling short of that goal and we can't be happy about that, that's all I was trying to point out. What we are able to do, in the meantime, of course, is continue to sustain very strong profits. We're enjoying low fuel prices and very strong operating margins are our expectation here for the third quarter. I don't have any reason to believe that that will change in the fourth quarter, but we have initiatives that come online in 2017 that bring with them the opportunity to boost our revenue production. So, we're in a period here between now and then, where we're just going to have to focus on blocking and tackling good revenue management, excellent customer service, tweaking our route network to try to use those levers here for the next several quarters. I think all the capacity questions that we're getting here today are very appropriate and that's something that we're going to have to take a very close look at. I agree with Tammy's point earlier, if that is one of the main levers that we have, we're just not prepared to give any 2017 guidance yet. And of course, I'll just remind everybody that last year, when we did guidance well in advance, it was – I think it was somewhat misunderstood. So, we've got to work to do in 2017, we've got the goal to boost unit revenues in 2017 and based on third quarter trends, we've got a little work to do.

Jack Atkins - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst · Stephens

Okay. Thank you for that, Gary. And then, I guess a follow up for Tammy. The maintenance line has been relatively elevated in terms of year-over-year growth for the past, I guess, three quarters now. How should we think about that line trending in the back half of the year and would you anticipate giving some relief there as you retire the Classic fleet and take delivery of your next gen aircraft next year? Just sort of how should we think about the maintenance line trending going forward? Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. Thanks, Jack. Yeah, the maintenance – our maintenance costs, you'll continue to see that trending down as we retire the Classic fleet and I would expect our maintenance unit costs in the third quarter to show some improvement as well. So we'll continue to see a relief in that as we retire our Classic and so we're – that should be a favorable trend as we move forward.

Jack Atkins - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst · Stephens

Okay, great. Thank you again for the time. Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Hunter Keay with Wolfe Research.

Hunter K. Keay - Wolfe Research LLC

Analyst · Wolfe Research

Hi. Tammy, I'm sorry. Can you please clarify, what you said before about the capacity question, you said something about 6% and a couple percent; I just pulled capacity data in Diio and it looks like you guys are growing ASMs by 1.6% in 1Q 2017, is that not right? Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: We... Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: No, that's not right. Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: No, that's not right. We don't have March. Robert E. Jordan - Chief Commercial Officer & Executive VP: A couple of things. We don't have March published and then you also have the impact of leap year here this year. Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. Robert E. Jordan - Chief Commercial Officer & Executive VP: So, I think it's just probably missing the month.

Hunter K. Keay - Wolfe Research LLC

Analyst · Wolfe Research

Okay. So, just to be clear, when you said 6%, Tammy's, then a couple percent, I'm just – what were you saying, how much you're growing, was that just like a January, February number? Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, those were just January and February. So, January probably up in, would you agree 6% range in February, up year-over-year a couple of percent.

Hunter K. Keay - Wolfe Research LLC

Analyst · Wolfe Research

All right. Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, because of leap year. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Because of leap year.

Hunter K. Keay - Wolfe Research LLC

Analyst · Wolfe Research

All right. Of course, okay. Is there a scenario where you see Southwest growing capacity less than GDP next year? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, that would be hard to do. I'm sure that just taking your question literally, I'm sure that there is a scenario. I wouldn't want you to think that it's a likely one, but as I think we pointed out, we don't want to – we don't see a compelling reason to tinker with the capacity that's published, certainly for the third quarter or the fourth quarter. So, these are recent trends and not ones that we're happy with. And so, as I think we've said several times, we've got some work to do. And as we typically do, we'll provide more guidance for the capacity plans here in the fourth quarter.

Hunter K. Keay - Wolfe Research LLC

Analyst · Wolfe Research

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Andrew Didora with Bank of America.

Andrew George Didora - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America

Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. Gary, I'm just trying to get a sense of how much you have seen the fare environment change from, I guess, your little bit more positive commentary at Investor Day until today. Maybe can you give us some order of magnitude in terms of how much weaker close-in yields are right now as opposed to where they were on average in 2Q and I guess, what can Southwest do to try to fix this problem? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, and as I'm assuming you know well it's – forecasting airline revenues is always treacherous. So, basically what happens is trends get extrapolated, there is – we'll start a month with half of the bookings in place that we would expect for that month. So, it's not necessarily a ground up – from the ground up kind of a forecast. I would say that the guidance that Tammy is offering today for the third quarter unit revenues of down 3% to 4% is much less than what we thought at Investor Day. So we've – in a short period of time in another words, we've reduced our forecast by 1.5 points to 2 points. Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: 2 points. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: So to 2 points. Now, that's mostly weaker revenues that we're seeing here for July, August. There was a question earlier about September. September does look better than July, August, but it's not anything that we're willing to tell you that you can take to the bank at all. So, the trend could change. We could be overly pessimistic here, it is most of the change in the trend…

Andrew George Didora - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America

Great. Thank you for that color, Gary. And my second question, I guess, you mentioned in your remarks that you have not gotten to a scenario where taking capacity out as profit accretive. I guess how much further would unit revenues have to fall in order for capacity reductions to make sense? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I'm sorry, I just – I can't do that math in my head. And again my answer with Mike Linenberg earlier was specific to the fourth quarter. So, we looked at some fourth quarter capacity changes that we could make and none of those looked productive to us. So, it will be – we'll spend our time better working on 2017. So, the hypothetical you're asking, I'm not – I can't readily answer, but clearly that's something that we want to look out here for 2017.

Andrew George Didora - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst · Bank of America

Fair enough. Thanks a lot.

Operator

Operator

And we'll take our next question from Darryl Genovesi with UBS.

Darryl Genovesi - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · UBS

Hi, guys. Thanks for the time. Gary, I realize I'm probably walking a thin line with the question, but I've heard you say a couple of times with regard to the fourth quarter at least that taking some capacity out, anyway that you sliced it wouldn't be profit accretive for Southwest. I mean I think if you look at what we've seen from some of the other carriers this quarter, most of the legacy carriers are trimming capacity. We can argue about what is the earliest you'd want to trim from the perspective of your customers, but those capacity cuts do likely help Southwest some way. And DOJ will, of course, complain about illegal price collusion or collusion of capacity levels, but there is also the opportunity, it seems, for some legal coordination, so to speak, on capacity levels and on pricing in the industry. And your comments suggest to me that you're perhaps resistive to playing that game. And I guess I just wonder, with Southwest having grown to be as large a player as it is in the industry today, isn't it kind of required that overall the industry is healthy in order for Southwest to be healthy?. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: You know what Darryl, I think I'm just not going to comment on your question.

Darryl Genovesi - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · UBS

Okay. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: I appreciate it, but I'm not going to comment.

Darryl Genovesi - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · UBS

Well, let me ask a simpler one then. Are you seeing any advantaged fares in the market today? And if so, what is your strategy for competing? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, the advantaged fares are just a fare. It's a technique, it is a low fare. We predicted 15 years ago that all carriers were going to – have to become low fare carriers. It is a very competitive environment and carriers use a variety of techniques to offer low fares, that's from the lowest-cost carrier to the highest-cost carrier and that changes all the time. And we don't talk about our techniques and we are certainly not going to comment about our competitors' pricing techniques.

Darryl Genovesi - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · UBS

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We'll take a next question from Savi Syth with Raymond James. Savanthi N. Syth - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Hey, good afternoon. Just , Gary, well-worn question here on the call. But I'm just trying to understand something here, just from Southwest's perspective related to your comments that you were saying that if you're looking at industry capacity and then you were growing just as much as the larger players in the market that you were surprised but not disappointed. And what I was wondering is what you were hoping to see when you're growing supply like 3 times faster than GDP. So I'm just wondering what the expectation was? And just if this is just not – is this from a Southwest perspective, were you just adjusting to a new lower fuel price environment? Why you would be surprised if you're growing so much faster than GDP, and then Southwest isn't moderating capacity. I think most of your competitors showed moderating capacity into the end of the year, what the expectation was? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, Savi, when we were having the same conversation three months ago, this was not the topic. So, we've got a change in trend. We'll need to evaluate that and see if we need to make some adjustments. I'll remind you that we had some secular opportunities to step up our growth in 2014, 2015. The added capacity that's coming online here this year is very modest, I believe, Bob, it's about 2%. So, you got the carryover effect of increasing the flying for the Wright Amendment, taking on the flying of the slots that we acquired for Reagan and LaGuardia. And then launching international service, which was a function of integrating AirTran and then what…

Operator

Operator

And we'll take our next question from Jamie Baker with JPMorgan.

Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan

Hey, good afternoon, everybody. Gary, the impression that investors have is that your priorities at the moment might be somewhat out of order. The impression is that passengers come first, then labor unions, and then shareholders. And that's certainly fine when all is right with the world, and it certainly worked well under Herb. But during a time of industry crisis, and I would suggest that's what current revenue trends imply, most companies would consider revisiting their sort of priority order, at least in the short run. So my question, as awkward as it may sound, is this. Are you prepared to suspend all labor negotiations until we solve for the industry's revenue crisis? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: No. No. I appreciate the question, but the premise I would push back on. I think that certainly more than any other airline – and I'd put us in there with top-notch industrials, we have done a very fine job of trying to balance the needs of all of our constituents. And we've taken very good care of our shareholders. And it's interesting that you describe the current period as a time of crisis when in the first half of this year, I believe we've had all-time record shareholder returns – in six months. So, if that's a crisis, I'll take it. But the notion that we put one over the other is an unfair characterization. We must have good employees, we must take good care of the employees, we have a very intensive business and we truly care about people. We care about our people and then in turn we care about our customers. And it is a virtuous cycle, and to think that you can simply ignore that and say, we're only going to focus on the shareholders, doesn't work, it's not sustainable. But we're famous for telling everyone, and admitting, that's who we are and we're just not – we're not going to apologize for that. It's worked; this is the most successful airline in history, that is now turning out record earnings. And so we want to sustain that. We want to sustain the returns for our shareholders and the best way to do that is to continue to take very good care of our people.

Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan

Second question – and thank you for that, Gary. I knew it was a challenging and potentially differentiated line of questioning. Second question; you've got weak PRASM. As Tammy pointed out, you've got load factors at record highs. You've inflicted a pretty sizable fuel headwind on yourselves. And you're guiding to a year-on-year earnings decline. So why do you routinely ignore initiatives, industry initiatives intended to restore pricing stability? Or put differently, why does Southwest potentially choose to be part of the problem instead of part of the solution? Thanks in advance. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I am unclear as to how we are part of the problem. So, feel free to elaborate and I'll do my best to answer.

Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan

Well, I know you like to stay clear, understandably, of specific pricing questions. But sitting out the last Delta-led $2 to $5 one-way initiative, which at one point or another every other airline in the States participated in. I realize now I'm veering in Darryl's direction, and – but I mean, that sort of thing. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: No, I think you've arrived at his destination.

Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan

Well. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: I will defer answering that question as well.

Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan

Okay. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: What I would just roll up to though here, is rather than talking about any specific pricing or specific capacity questions that are really, as we all understand, off limits, our goal is to have positive unit revenues and we have seen that become – through the first half of the year we were doing a pretty good job there. The second half of the year now has emerged as more challenging for the reasons that we have articulated and I think it is incumbent upon us to figure out what we are going to do about that and we have all the tools that you are aware of. We have pricing, we have ancillary revenues, we have our capacity, and then of course new revenue initiatives, and we'll take a very close look at all of those and see what we can do to hit our goal.

Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan

Okay. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: I don't think we had a decent – I don't think we have a reasonable prospect of having positive unit revenues in the third quarter. It probably is difficult to assume that for the fourth quarter. So that doesn't mean we won't make a hearty effort in that regard, but we'll certainly be looking very closely at that for 2017.

Jamie N. Baker - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan

I do appreciate it, Gary. Thank you. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Yes sir.

Operator

Operator

And we have time for one more question. We'll take our last question from Joseph DeNardi with Stifel. Joseph DeNardi - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Yes. Thank you very much. Gary, just, I guess pretty simply, if RASM is down again 3% to 4% in fourth quarter, is that bad enough for you to cut capacity next year? What's the threshold that you're kind of looking at? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: I think again, I know you all are pressing for specifics, we're just not prepared to give you that kind of a capacity outlook for 2017 or a bright line. I'm not happy with down unit revenues of 3% to 4%. And hopefully that tells you what you need to know. I'm interested to see if those trends continue and then we will take action accordingly. Joseph DeNardi - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay. And then Tammy, what's the – just as we sit here today, what's the expected fuel hedge loss in 2017? Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: The full loss, let me see if I have that handy. As I have the fair market value beyond third quarter, which I provided, which was $775 million, the net liability, you're asking for our total portfolio, which would be a net liability of $775 million beyond third quarter. Is that your question or are you asking for a break-down between... Joseph DeNardi - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: No. Just – I guess just for 2017, just how to think about how the loss is going to impact 2017. Tammy Romo - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. For 2017 is about $550 million range. Joseph DeNardi - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And that concludes the analyst portion of today's call. Thank you for joining. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll now begin our media portion of today's call. I'd like to first introduce Ms. Linda Rutherford, Vice President and Chief Communications Officer.

Linda B. Rutherford - Vice President and Chief Communications Officer

Analyst

Good afternoon, Tom. Thank you very much. I'll go ahead and let you give instructions for folks to queue up and we'll go ahead and get into Q&A.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, ma'am. And thank you for waiting. We will now begin with of first question from Andrea Ahles with Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Andrea Ahles - Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Analyst · Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Hey, good afternoon, Gary. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the technology outage, the computer outage you had yesterday. And what sort of assurances do customers have that something like this won't happen again? It seemed pretty catastrophic yesterday. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: That is a very fair question. I think we have hard work (62:25) to answer that because we do have significant redundancies build into our mission-critical systems and those redundancies did not work. I think we need to understand why and make sure that doesn't happen again. Every company has its challenges and things will break. We just need to make sure that they break and can be fixed in such a way that it doesn't have that kind of impact on the customer experience. So, we've got some work to do to restore confidence in our customers. We're obviously very passionate about serving our customers and determined to never have that happen again.

Andrea Ahles - Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Analyst · Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Can you say a little more specifically, like was this an equipment failure that then sort of cascaded through your different systems? Or was it just everything kind of went down? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. Mike, you want to describe it? Michael G. Van de Ven - Chief Operating Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, it was a router failure in our network. And the recovery mechanisms did not work as planned with that router. And it slowed the rest of the applications down to such an extent that they weren't usable. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: And to my knowledge, we haven't had anything like this in our history. So, this is something that is unique for us. What we do understand is that the – some of our older legacy applications were the culprit, whereas a lot of the newer technology did recover as planned, but it's also integrated in networks that, again the whole system did not, it was not recovered and restored. Now eventually, it was, and there all of that was fixed through the course of 12 hours and over the course of 12 hours, multiple things were attempted to try to recover very quickly and ultimately they sort of went back to bedrock and rebooted everything, is probably a simplest way to describe it in layperson's terms. Michael G. Van de Ven - Chief Operating Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. And I would also add that router failures are not uncommon. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: No, no. Michael G. Van de Ven - Chief Operating Officer & Executive Vice President: And so, but the severity and duration of this on our operations was, as Gary said, extremely unusual and we're trying to dig into that detail to understand that better.

Andrea Ahles - Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Analyst · Fort Worth Star-Telegram

All right. Thank you so much for the details. I appreciate it. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: You bet.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from David Koenig with The Associated Press.

David Koenig - The Associated Press

Analyst · The Associated Press

Well, shockingly it's about the same topic. And I think you covered a lot of the ground that I was going to ask about. But just again maybe if you can take one more try and being as specific as you can. What is Southwest doing, either things that were already in the works or new steps since the failure, since the outage, to prevent a recurrence? This is your second one now in less than a year. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, that's a fair question, David. I think this is – we're not even 24 hours into this. So, the first priority is to get the operation back up and running and serve the customers right now that need to get where they want to go. So that is our priority. Then to take a step back and understand why all the redundancy that we have invested in did not operate, that comes next. Mike, I don't know if you have any more information. Mike has been more involved with this as our Chief Operating Officer than I am, so. Michael G. Van de Ven - Chief Operating Officer & Executive Vice President: So, David, we need to, as Gary was saying, we need to jump in and understand exactly what happened in this specific event. We will then have – add that learning to our recovery profiles with the intent, as mentioned earlier, with the intent of making sure that our recovery happens quicker and the issues don't expand quite like they did in this event. So, that's the first thing. The second thing that we're doing and have been doing is we are making significant investments in our technology, we've talked about, our Lone Star program, we've talked about our other operational investments, and all of those are going to bring our infrastructure and platforms up to a more up-to-date technologies. And that will allow us to recover faster than what we've been to do in this particular event.

David Koenig - The Associated Press

Analyst · The Associated Press

Okay. I know it's early. Any chance you would speed up that investment timetable? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, the investment timetable, I don't know. I think in terms of – I think the simplest way to describe this is, you can relate to power and a backup generator, where if the power goes down for whatever reason, you flip a switch and you've got a diesel generator that kicks in. So that conceptual backup did not work. And we need to understand better why that is, and we're just not prepared to do that yet. In terms of accelerating our investment, we're making significant investments in the technology already. And that – we've been talking about that, David, for some time, the need to do that. We have a legacy reservation system, as an example, and that is a major undertaking, and one that we're all looking forward to having that replaced next year. So, it will over the next three to five years, we'll have significant replacements of our legacy systems. I think we're already moving as fast as we can and in the meantime we'll just need to make sure that our business recovery processes are robust and will support the situation when another router breaks, because inevitably one will.

David Koenig - The Associated Press

Analyst · The Associated Press

Okay. Thanks, very much. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Yes, sir.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Richard Velotta with Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Richard Velotta - Las Vegas Review-Journal

Analyst · Las Vegas Review-Journal

Good morning, Gary. Do you have any estimates on how much the outage is going to cost you in terms of vouchers, overtime, equipment replacement, that type of thing? Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: We do. I think it's a little bit premature, but we're having a very good day today in terms of our business, but obviously with the system being down yesterday, we couldn't take bookings. So, I think that we'll be able to recover much of that, but that – just that alone may cost us in the $5 million to $10 million range on a net basis, but we've got some work to do to recover bookings for the future that we would have gotten yesterday. So, Bob Jordan is here, I'll let him speak to this, but he is doing a couple of things to do more than just say we're sorry for our customers, and one of those is we're extending the fare sale that we had planned to end tomorrow, I believe. So, he is extending that a week. But Bob, do you want to talk about a couple of the things that we're doing? Robert E. Jordan - Chief Commercial Officer & Executive VP: Sure. As Mike talked about, priority one is obviously to get back up and operating and then right attached to that is to make sure we take care of our customers. So, everybody affected yesterday and it's going to continue today. So, all of our customers affected yesterday and today, we'll be contacting every one of them in some form here over the next couple of days and handling them. In addition, we just posted a full week extension of a major sale that we have going that was intended to end today. So, we're going to extend that for a full week to make sure everybody has access to those great fares, again that we're going to end – the sale was going to end today. So, – but again, priority one is to take care of our customers. So, everybody affected will be hearing from us. Gary C. Kelly - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: And I just wanted to add on to that quickly, Rich, yes, we're worried about the financial impact of this, but what is far more important is the inconvenience that we caused our customers yesterday and today. And I feel very bad about that, we're very apologetic, and we want to just work hard to again restore their confidence in us.

Richard Velotta - Las Vegas Review-Journal

Analyst · Las Vegas Review-Journal

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And that is the final question we have today. At this time, I'd like to turn the call back over to Ms. Rutherford for any additional or closing remarks.

Linda B. Rutherford - Vice President and Chief Communications Officer

Analyst

Thanks for joining us. If you all have any other questions, you can reach us at www.swamedia.com, and we will route that to an on-duty spokesperson. Thanks so much.

Operator

Operator

And that concludes today's call. Thank you for joining.