Earnings Labs

Allegiant Travel Company (ALGT)

Q3 2008 Earnings Call· Wed, Oct 22, 2008

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

We have on the call today Maury Gallagher, the company’s President, CEO and Chairman, Andrew Levy, CFO and Managing Director of Planning for the company and Ponder Harrison, the company’s Managing Director of Marketing and Sales. Today’s comments will begin with Maury Gallagher followed by Ponder Harrison and then Andrew Levy. After the presentation we will hold a short question and answer session. We wish to remind listeners to this webcast that the company’s comments today will contain forward-looking statements that are only predicts and involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements made today may include, among others, references to future performance and any comments about our strategic plans. There are many risk factors that could prevent us from achieving our goals and cause the underlying assumptions of these forward-looking statements and our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by our forward-looking statements. These risk factors and others are more fully discussed in our filings with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Any forward-looking statements are based on information available to us today and we undertake no obligation to update publically any forward-looking statements whether as a result of future events, new information or otherwise. The company cautions users of this presentation not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements which may be based on assumptions and anticipated events that do not materialize. The earnings release as well as a rebroadcast of this call are available at the company’s investor relations site ir.AllegiantAir.com. At this time I would like to turn the call over to Maury Gallagher for opening remarks.

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

It’s a pleasure to talk with you again this morning. Joining me today as the operator indicated are Andrew Levy, our CFO and Managing Director of Planning, Ponder Harrison, Managing Director of Sales and Marketing and also in the room is Robert Ashcroft of Vice President of Planning. I’ll give a brief overview, Ponder will comment on our revenue results and Andrew will wrap up with comments on our network activity, expenses and balance sheet. Once again, we had an excellent quarter. If you recall, our last conversation we talked about our unit revenues beginning to increase nicely particularly in June. The story this quarter is the maturing of these revenue increases. They are the culmination of a great many changes taken by our management team over the past year to maintain and increase our profitability in the face of accelerating fuel costs. It takes time to roll these changes through our system. But, in the third quarter we began to see some real traction from reductions in capacity and corresponding fare increases. As a result, operating margins almost doubled to 7% this quarter from our second quarter operating margin of 3.6% while fuel was essentially unchanged from the second quarter. I might add that we produced our results without the benefit of any fuel hedges. Ironically, while operating without hedges opened us up for some criticism when fuel prices were racing towards $150 a barrel, it’s serving us quite well now that oil prices are in free fall. As we have been commenting, our number one corporate goal is profits. Moreover, we continue to be focused on double digit margins as our standard. Last year we achieved these results in the third quarter and then fuel began its decline. We reacted by cutting long haul flights in a number…

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

As Maury already pointed out, all facets of revenue growth during what is traditionally our weakest quarter worked out very well. We remained true to our historical approach of aggressively adjusting capacity to fit demand on a market specific basis. This philosophy fits solidly with our flexible leisure focused destination oriented business model and has served us well even before fuel prices skyrocketed and drastic capacity cuts throughout the industry became vogue. However, we approached the third quarter much more cautiously this year than in years past and we believe that this strategy was more than validated based upon the exceptional year-over-year unit revenue improvement. Now, to the numbers, as Maury mentioned total operating revenue grew by 35% to just over $116 million, a year-over-year increase of approximately $31 million. Equally important, all major revenue line items, fix fee, scheduled service and ancillary contributed positive year-over-year results. Let’s briefly review each one individually. First off fixed fee, fixed fee revenue increased significantly as Maury mentioned by 93% year-over-year producing $14 million and comprising just over 12% of total operating revenue. The year-over-year gains were driven principally by three factors, first additional flying that we performed for Harrahs in Tunica Mississippi. Second, track charter program flying for MLT Vacations, a contract which begin in June of this year and actually will end this month. Third, a significant uptick in our fall ad hoc charter work. Availability of our east coast based aircraft for charter lift correlates quite well with the significant annual third quarter capacity reductions in our Florida markets. We’re also seeing the benefit of a very new aggressive sales team focused on ad hocs that we put in place back in March of this year. With respect to scheduled service, despite a 3% overall reduction in capacity as dictated…

Andrew C. Levy

Management

We’re pleased to report our 23rd consecutive quarter of economic profits. Our 6.9% operating margin and 6.6% pre-tax margin lead all our US peers that have reported to date. While our third quarter ’08 profits fall short of our goal of double digit margins, we have made progress as compared with the preceding quarter and we remain confident we can return to that level of profitability as soon as the fourth quarter if fuel prices remain near current levels. We have repeatedly stated we can produce strong profit margins at any fuel price as long as we have time to adjust our network and capacity. While these adjustments were made in the second quarter when we loaded our third and fourth quarter schedules, based on our expectations of substantially higher fuel prices and now instead of nearly stable fuel prices they have dropped dramatically to levels close to 50% of where the futures curve had predicted prices would be. Obviously, we are very pleased with this development and we will enjoy 100% of the benefits since we ceased our hedging program over one year ago. Turning to costs, we are pleased with our cost management during the third quarter. As Maury stated in his comments, when utilization and average stage length are reduced, unit costs will increase but, this does not overly concern us as long as revenues increase faster than costs. We manage our business to maximize earnings not to minimize unit costs. Three expense areas increased at a faster pace than revenues and let me touch on each of these. First, fuel expense increased by 55.1% driven mostly by an increase in cost per gallon of 48.3% from $2.32 to $3.44, only slightly lower than the $3.52 we paid during the second quarter. Fuel did us no real…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Michael Linenberg – Merrill Lynch. Michael Linenberg – Merrill Lynch: I have a couple of questions, first just a nit here, Maury when you had given some early guidance on the fourth quarter you said the indication was that you would meet or exceed the fourth quarter of a year ago. How should we take that when you talk about it meeting or exceeding when the last couple of quarters your loads have been up significantly on both the scheduled and on a system basis so are you tempering the load gain? Maybe it’s up a couple of points or are we going to see something like we saw in the third quarter?

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

Let me first clarify Michael that I wasn’t suggesting fourth quarter numbers, I was referencing fourth quarter statistics we achieved last year. I think you asked specifically about the load factor that I referenced and just to be conservative, I’m not trying to temper and say that we’re not going to make good numbers but I’m pretty comfortable that we can make those numbers at this point in time. Michael Linenberg – Merrill Lynch: My second question when we look at your departure and ASM stats for fourth quarter and even first quarter of ’09, is that scheduled or is that total? And, if that is total can you just break out between scheduled and charter only because your charter numbers were up a lot and I’m just trying to get a better feel of the breakdown between the two?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

Those numbers are total so that does include the fixed and I’m afraid I don’t think I have those numbers at my finger tips at the moment but clearly the fixed fee has gotten larger year-over-year. The business is still driven by what we do on the schedule side of the house. Michael Linenberg – Merrill Lynch: Just I guess with the MLT piece going away in October how much of that was – because I know we can kind of back in to it, what did that represent of the total?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

MLT was a fairly meaningful contributor to third quarter earnings. I’d say I believe it was in the range of about $3 million of revenue, somewhere in that range. And, we have a partial month of that at a much reduced amount of flying in the month of October and then that program will be over. Michael Linenberg – Merrill Lynch: Then just my last question, this may have come up on the last call but where you guys are with respect to new aircraft purchases because at $110 or $120 oil and where the MD80s are on an efficiency basis you may have come to a different conclusion than where you would be today with oil under $70 a barrel. Just your latest thoughts on that would be great?

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

I’ll comment and then Andrew might have some further comments. The world has changed considerably at least in my looking glass and we’re sitting on the sidelines at this point just wondering what’s the outcome of all this. We certainly have our head down focused on our activity for next year, we’ve had a lot of growth already in the system. New airplanes, are they available? I don’t know. Boeing has always been very tough trying to even get stuff out of them. My guess is they’re going to loosen up considerably. Having said that, we like what we’ve got right now in our formal with fuel coming down it really has kind of made this business even more advantageous. But, at the end of the day we’re on the sidelines right now. At a minimum we’ve been told there’s minimum debt out there knowing you can finance the airplanes. But, be that as it may, we like what we’re doing at this point. We’re never going to say never in this regard but it’s a good time to sit and watch we think.

Andrew C. Levy

Management

No further thoughts but let me go back to the question about MLT, it actually contributed about $2.4 million of revenue in the quarter.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Kevin Crissy – UBS. Kevin Crissy – UBS: Can you talk about the demand by destination and maybe the trends of I don’t know how you want to costify it fare or RASM kind of by destination if there’s been a change in that?

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

Kevin, as a general rule we don’t kind of talk about those things on a breakout basis here. I’m not sure we’re even prepared to kind of go through it because we’ve got six, seven or eight destinations now with all the different things we’re doing.

Andrew C. Levy

Management

Let me make one comment Kevin. I think that one of the interesting things that we’ve done is that we’ve mapped a little bit of the severity of the capacity reductions that we’ve made in some of our older destinations because we have been expanding the network. If you were to look at kind of let’s say a same store approach in Las Vegas, St. Petersburg and Orlando, three major destinations that we were in all of last fourth quarter. In the great majority of those markets, the city pairs that we served this quarter and last quarter, we have fewer seats in the market. On an overall basis, if you wanted to look at it on ASMs, as much as we don’t care for that particularly as a good measure of capacity but the reductions are very significant, well in to the double digits. So, we expect to benefit as a result of that on the fare side of the equation and obviously it’s easier to drive very high loads when you constrict capacity the way that we have.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Steve O’Hara – Sidoti & Company, LLC. Steve O’Hara – Sidoti & Company, LLC: Just curious about your utilization, it seems like you have a ton of leverage there in terms of your hourly utilization. Is there a limit on where you can go with the MD80 in terms of daily utilization?

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

When you say limit? Steve O’Hara – Sidoti & Company, LLC: Well I guess my question is I assume maintenance will go up as hourly utilization increases past a certain point?

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

Well, we’ve never pushed the airplane past seven hours in our five, six, seven years we’ve been doing this. I couldn’t disagree with you that if you tried to get 10 hours out of the airplane you’re probably going to spend more on maintenance, just day-to-day maintenance trying to keep the airplane [inaudible]. As we look forward though we just don’t see doing more than the seven hours a day for the utilization we’re looking at. Having said that, that’s kind of a 20% increase in where we’re at now in the low fives for the third quarter and fourth quarter won’t be that much above that as well. Steve O’Hara – Sidoti & Company, LLC: Then the second thing is in terms of our average stage length, I mean that’s come down quite a bit. Are you comfortable with the level it’s at right now? Do you see it continuing to decrease or possibly increasing with fuel where it is?

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

Well, it will be increasing somewhat the fourth quarter as we’ve added some longer haul flying in Phoenix that’s stretching us out a little bit. Any other longer haul?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

Yeah, there’s some longer haul flights that we’ve added in Florida as well which are performing very, very well by the way. It’s going to increase slightly.

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

It should be in the high eights is what I would suggest to you to look at Steve. Steve O’Hara – Sidoti & Company, LLC: Then lastly, the military charter, when does that begin?

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

As soon as now. There’s a lot of paperwork to get done, there’s always paperwork with these things and hopefully we’re ready for a phone call here not in too distant future. In other words, go to work.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from James Parker – Raymond James. James Parker – Raymond James: I have a question for Ponder. Ponder, what are you planning to charge for priority boarding?

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

Jim, right now we are just rolling it out. We actually introduced it last Thursday evening and we initially loaded it at a rate of $5. That is purely experimental at this point. We have moved that price point around even since the initial load to a variety of price points not exceeding $10 I would add but probably every variation between $10 and $5. We may couple that with some other services and try and further create value to the idea of boarding first. In particular we mentioned the carryon baggage opportunity. So, if you were to look at the website last week you’d see $5, if you looked at it over the weekend you’d see some different numbers so it’s a fairly dynamic price point at this moment because we’re just trying to understand it’s take rate. I would mention that you need to book a pre-assigned seat with us in order to have the opportunity to priority board as well so those two are coupled together at this time. James Parker – Raymond James: That was my next question, what proportion of your passengers purchase an assigned seat?

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

I don’t know if we’ve ever really specifically released that number, I think we’ve talked in general terms. It depends on seasonality and the destination and on the stage length as well. But, often times I think a good average number would be roughly half our customers in general end up booking a pre-assigned seat. James Parker – Raymond James: So who get’s on first? The people that purchase an assigned seat and then the priority boarding person get’s on?

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

No. The priority boarding customers will actually board the aircraft first. The pre-assigned seat going forward simple gets you the seat. James Parker – Raymond James: And how do I know if I’ve gotten a priority boarding pass whether this isle seat is already taken by someone?

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

Well, it’s a separate product. Again, if you’ve not purchased a pre-assigned seat in the web booking pass, by definition you don’t get priority boarding. Priority boarding is a new product, it’s called out specifically in our seat map menu and based on your confirmation and your boarding pass, you will know whether or not you’re a priority boarding customer. James Parker – Raymond James: Maury, let me get to this maintenance issue, so I just think it’s great that you operate MD80s but the other side of that is maintenance which I’ve been around these type airplanes for a and usually in these supplies and maintenance, it’s on the upside. I think last quarter you had pretty high maintenance costs per aircraft and you were thinking maybe this quarter it goes down or maybe after this quarter. Now you’ve said it’s going to stay high at $91,000 through ’09. Is this the new maintenance rate? Are these aircraft maintenance costs going up that much and this isn’t a blip for a quarter or two or whatever? This is it. These aircraft just cost a lot to maintain?

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

First off, I’m not sure I’d call them a lot at that point. A couple of things Jim. Organizationally, we’ve not done as good a job over the last six to nine months in just managing stuff, making sure we’re getting proper repairs, things like that. And I think that’s just endemic of any organization that grows. We’re attacking it voraciously here with our new systems process. Our new building is allowing us to put everybody together and we’re literally going after a lot of this stuff day-to-day. We expect that to improve things. The second area is that we’re just getting into some heavier maintenance checks that in the sense of they’re progressive. You do a light one the first time. The second one’s a little heavier. Third one’s heavier still. I think the fourth one rounds out the heaviest. Then you go back to the light one. Depending on where your fleet is at, you can progress into some heavier checks and I think we’re expecting to see more of those next year than we saw say in the past year. Having said that, as Andrew suggested, we really do believe you should look at airplane maintenance kind of as a fixed cost. That $91,000 while it’s higher; we hope to beat that I might add; but that’s the conservative number that should be very doable by us as we go forward on average.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Duane Pfennigwerth - Raymond James.

Duane Pfennigwerth - Raymond James

Analyst

On your routes to Vegas year-to-year, I saw they were down four. I wondered if you could talk about how many you entered in terms of new cities to Vegas? How many routes were actually cut versus how many were added in that net down four?

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

That’s a good question. I believe that we’ve eliminated about nine routes of a long-haul nature that we were flying last fourth quarter. A couple routes that we’ve added, and we mentioned this in the release, are really replacement routes like Appleton instead of Green Bay and Grand Island, Nebraska instead of Lincoln. We mentioned a couple others that we’ve added and not yet started here in Grand Forks and Casper, and earlier this year we added Santa Barbara and Monterey into Las Vegas as well. I think I’ve captured them all at that point. I’m not sure how that nets out.

Duane Pfennigwerth - Raymond James

Analyst

You may have already answered this, but if you look at the routes that were in service in both periods, can you characterize same-store RASM to Vegas and what does that look like if you included or exclude trends in hotel take rate?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

I can tell you that same-store RASM if you’re just looking at Vegas but the same holds true with St. Peter or Orland, air RASM is definitely up as a result of the capacity changes that we’ve made on a same-store route; same routes this year; same routes last year. So if you restrict capacity, there’s no question that you get higher fares. And we’ve seen that. It’s kind of independent of take rate on hotels. We view that as completely separate and distinct I think.

Duane Pfennigwerth - Raymond James

Analyst

On fuel, to your credit you’re unhedged here, the only domestic airline we follow that is. What price do you really consider it seriously? If you wanted to given your balance sheet, how much of ’09 could you hedge out and how would you think about doing that?

Maurice J. Gallagher, Jr.

Management

We continue to debate internally on hedging. Certainly I think it’s been a wise strategy when fuel is moving so quickly, trying to pick a point upon an upside of the mountain or the downside of the mountain where you think you want to enter the market is tough. If you’re hedging, you should be hedging all the time because the theory then is that you’re just offsetting or locking in future revenues with fuel prices that exist at the time you’re making the sale. The fallacy in that argument is that particularly in the past years, you’ve not been able to raise fares to be compensatory with the hedges that are being offered at the time, so you’re in effect locking in losses. If the fuel moves off of that, then you’ve either got a further loss or possibly a gain. As we sit here looking forward, as we discuss it internally, we’re still debating should we speculate. I [inaudible] the term speculate personally. At what rate should we do it? We really believe managing the business for the business’ sake using the airplanes, using the capacity, using the accordion effect, add capacity, shrink capacity as fuel dictates allows us to be reactive to fuel. If you wanted to speculate, you’re starting to get into ranges where buying fuel at this point and Southwest buying in 50s in ’07 did well for them. We have no any specific plans at this point to buy hedges or to speculate at this point. Andrew, do you have any further thoughts?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

I think the only other thing I’d add is that we believe we have the balance sheet strength to hedge as much as we want, certainly through the entire 2009 timeframe and probably beyond that. I don’t think the balance sheet really comes into play as far as when we think about our hedging strategies.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Bob McAdoo - Avondale Partners.

Bob McAdoo - Avondale Partners

Analyst

Can you help us think about longer-term growth profiles? We know about the six airplanes, but in terms of realistically in terms of people trying to think about this company as a growth company going forward, what are your thoughts in terms of what’s reasonable to be assuming or given the nature of airplanes and the nature of roots assuming fuel doesn’t go jumping around a lot? How do we tell people that they should be thinking about this from a longer-term growth point of view?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

The first thing I would say is that we grew revenues 35% this quarter. That may not have required a lot of capacity growth but that’s even better. I think clearly we’re a growth company. As far as adding of departures, aircraft and what not, we have lots of capacity. Historically we’ve operated the fleet closer to seven hours’ utilization per day and we’ve brought that in this quarter, and next quarter we’ll see the same thing. Certainly as we get more comfortable with the economic environment both fuel and demand, we can very quickly add a lot of that capacity back in. On top of that we have these six airplanes that are going to be added to the fleet. We think that we’ll grow as fast as the opportunities present themselves. We think there are certainly lots and lots of opportunities in terms of new routes and adding back capacity to many of the routes that capacity which we took out because of what we’re looking at in the futures market on oil. I think we’re just going to make decisions when we need to; not ahead of time; so that’s why we haven’t given any guidance beyond the first quarter.

Bob McAdoo - Avondale Partners

Analyst

I guess what I’m saying is, obviously we’ve seen the Jet Blues of the world and some of these other guys who said, “Oh I can grow 35% or 40% per year forever.” At some point it gets to be too big to be able to do that. I’m trying to figure out where you think you guys are in that cycle.

Andrew C. Levy

Management

I think that what we said before is we think the five-year 15% to 20% [compound] annual growth rate from a capacity standpoint is still very, very doable and that it’s not a matter of a lack of opportunities for growth if you look out in the future but on a tactical basis quarter-by-quarter we’re going to be focused on some of the issues we discussed today.

Bob McAdoo - Avondale Partners

Analyst

Obviously with what’s going on on Wall Street and residential housing and every other crazy thing, what’s been the trend in terms of the last few days? Have we seen any pluses or minuses in terms of new bookings coming in through the call center or any new bookings coming through the website? Is there any kind of thing you can say in terms of the last few days versus what we were a week ago or two weeks ago or three weeks ago in terms of the flow of new bookings coming in? Is there any change one way or the other?

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

Maybe I can give you some color on that. You may or may not be aware that traditionally in the fourth quarter we will run a Las Vegas fare special. It’s a fly free type promotion that lasts for approximately two to three weeks, and we just kicked that off this past Sunday. That was not in any way a reaction to the current market environment. That’s just something that we would normally do to try to load for demand. So we’ve got a fairly baseline really reaching back over the last four to five years of this same type of promotion, certainly in same-store markets. As I think Andrew mentioned earlier, we’re not in a number of our longer-haul markets at the same point that we were last year. Probably eight or nine of them to be specific. Those were very strong contributors to the Vegas hotel take rate. They just couldn’t make money obviously at high fuel prices. But when we look at a same-store sale, we would look at our hotel revenue. We’ve got a fairly good barometer like-for-like as to kind of how current bookings are progressing and right now they look like they’re coming in as Maurice indicated right on target. We don’t see a whole lot of reduction year-over-year. We certainly don’t see significant increases year-over-year at this point but again the bookings look very solid relative to what our expectation would be and on a year-over-year basis same-store sales seem right in line as well. We’ve not seen massive erosion.

Bob McAdoo - Avondale Partners

Analyst

In terms of what’s going on in the last week versus a week ago or two weeks ago when the market was maybe even looking worse versus what’s happened in the last few days other than today, basically what you’re saying is there really hasn’t been any impact to it?

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

I wouldn’t feel comfortable giving any kind of statistical point on that. I think one other variable worth mentioning is our stage length. As we brought the stage length in, it somewhat shortened our booking curve. We still have very good visibility looking out but we just actually are putting more demand into our periods on a tighter basis. We do that particularly in Florida as we add some of the new markets that have a much shorter stage length, so a number of those new markets we don’t have as good of visibility into them today say as we would had we been in them a year. That being said, we’re comfortable with what we’re seeing right now.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Travis Anderson - Gilder Gagnon Howe.

Travis Anderson - Gilder Gagnon Howe

Analyst

I was really going to ask Bob’s question and I guess the only thing I would ask in addition is, I know you sell trip insurance. Have you seen any increase there perhaps or any fall off in farm economy with some of the problems in commodity prices at all?

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

No noticeable movement in our trip insurance. It continues to move but it moves very slowly. We haven’t seen a jump in that as a hedge. No real noticeable impact negative or positive to the agricultural communities that we serve or the natural resource communities that we serve.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from [Scott Mackey - AAD Capital]. [Scott Mackey - AAD Capital]: Just a point of clarification that I think has already been clarified. When you talked about load and yield in the fourth quarter, you were talking about fourth quarter of ’08 versus fourth quarter of ’07 year-over-year sustaining load and yield?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

Yes.

Travis Anderson - Gilder Gagnon Howe

Analyst

The $91,000 per month per aircraft of maintenance, what did that look like last year?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

Last year in the quarter I think I mentioned that it was $69,000. When we looked at it on a two-year average looking at ’06 and ’07, it was $78,000. In general it was fairly tight quarter-over-quarter. There were a couple outliers; one on the high side and one on the low side. Third quarter ’07 was actually the low side.

Travis Anderson - Gilder Gagnon Howe

Analyst

You talk about the ability to dial up capacity on block hours. You’ve also got new routes that are already in process. As we think about dialing back up the block hours, are those more likely to come from existing routes or will those go to additional new routes?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

I think those would be existing clearly. We’ve put out a lot of new routes. We have some more we’re going to be putting in and we certainly think there are lots more out there in future times. When we talked about dialing up capacity, it’s putting more capacity into existing routes particularly those where we’ve really taken a lot of capacity out on a year-over-year basis out of concern over the fuel prices that we were seeing.

Travis Anderson - Gilder Gagnon Howe

Analyst

As I think about yield and load in dialing those block hours back up, then again maybe this goes back to your point of just looking on an overall earnings basis and not necessarily sustaining yield or load as I dial those back up or will those only be dialed up if I sustain yield and load?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

I think that we’re going to put in capacity if we think we can increase earnings. That’s how we’re going to look at that. Could load and yield go down? Yes. It’s certainly possible because at the end of the day we just want to maximize earnings. But we’re going to be very prudent about how we do that to make sure that we give ourselves the best chance to actually increase earnings. I think on load factor we have said that we’re going to manage for high load factors and I think that remains true regardless of the amount of capacity that’s in the market. The load declining because there’s more capacity is less likely than perhaps some yield erosion.

Travis Anderson - Gilder Gagnon Howe

Analyst

As we go into these new routes, could you talk a little bit about historical experience just in terms of load and yield, your first three to six months as you get into these new routes? Is there an impact as I model this out or do they tend to come in higher or lower than the other aspects of the system?

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

Maybe I can shed some light on that. You kind of have to look at each of the unique destinations. For instance, in our Phoenix expansion that we’ve inputted in load into the fourth quarter, every one of those markets is a market that we actually currently serve already. So those five to six cities, we’re already there. Typically where we have a presence we do see those markets come up to speed a little more quickly perhaps than we do markets where we have not had a presence. For instance, we’ve added Bozeman and [Calis Bell] into Las Vegas. Those are new markets where heretofore we’ve had no presence. In the St. Pete market’s the only market expansion where we had not been is Lexington. All the rest we actually already have a presence. Again we’re adding of the five markets, three are new: Elmira, Hagerstown and Lexington. The other two we’ve been in. In markets where we’ve had a presence, where we have a brand, where we already serve existing destinations we see I wouldn’t say instant traction but it’s very good traction very quickly. That being said, we load capacity in new markets we believe in the right time of year. This is when the wind’s at our back, there’s a natural desire to travel during these periods as well, and we’re able to get good market response fairly rapidly.

Travis Anderson - Gilder Gagnon Howe

Analyst

Could you talk about the potential or the ongoing negotiations to some of the Vegas hotels and the rental car opportunity? As I model out the ancillary revenue, can you help me just kind of define the parameters? I appreciate the information on the take rates. That was very helpful. Just the potential opportunity that you see in negotiating or renegotiating some of those and what that could add to ancillary revenue per passenger?

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

I don’t know that I can be extremely specific about that but we have been in negotiations with a number of the hotels here. We remain constantly in dialogue with them. We are always looking to maximize our position relative to reductions in rates. Rates are down year-over-year both on a flown basis as well as a sold basis. Really the strategy for us is to try to maintain margin and/or drive margin where possible and to try to drive that take rate. As I think we mentioned, we did sell more room nights in the third quarter year-over-year even with the reduction in departures in Vegas and that’s what drove roughly instead of 14% room night growth we ended up having 32% room nights per departure in Vegas. We do believe there’s upside. We’re just trying to navigate that and it’s kind of a dance that we do on a daily basis. Nothing definitive at this point. Just in terms of cars, we’ve worked exclusively with Alamo for a number of years. They’ve been acquired by the Enterprise Rent-a-Car Holding Company and we’re real pleased with our relationship. If we were to renew it, we’d probably do it on an exclusive basis and it would be extremely favorable to us. Otherwise we would look elsewhere.

Travis Anderson - Gilder Gagnon Howe

Analyst

Is the opportunity on the hotel side for you guys primarily on that take rate and the ability to drive that higher or did you also in the quarter see a higher revenue per transaction or per room as well?

M. Ponder Harrison

Management

I don’t know that we can comment on that. I think the take rate is certainly something we’re going to work on.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Kim Zotter - Imperial Capital.

Kim Zotter - Imperial Capital

Analyst

Most of my questions are already answered, but just a quick housekeeping item. What was your third quarter end debt balance?

Andrew C. Levy

Management

$70 million give or take.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time.

Andrew C. Levy

Management

Thank you everyone for your time. We appreciate your interest. We’ll look forward to talking to you at the end of January or thereabouts as we get ready for our first quarter of the new year on our fourth quarter activity. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

That does conclude today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Have a wonderful day.