Operator
Operator
Hello, and welcome to the Wheels Up Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. My name is Alex, and I will be your operator for today. [Operator Instructions]. I will now hand over to Keith Ferguson from Wheels Up. Keith, over to you.
Wheels Up Experience Inc. (UP)
Q3 2021 Earnings Call· Thu, Nov 11, 2021
$6.21
-0.96%
Same-Day
+1.73%
1 Week
-13.84%
1 Month
-26.99%
vs S&P
-26.15%
Operator
Operator
Hello, and welcome to the Wheels Up Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. My name is Alex, and I will be your operator for today. [Operator Instructions]. I will now hand over to Keith Ferguson from Wheels Up. Keith, over to you.
Keith Ferguson
Analyst
Thank you, and welcome again to Wheels Up's Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing our financial results for the period. The release with its supporting tables as well as a copy of today's presentation can be found on our Investor Relations website at wheelsup.com/investors. Please refer to the slides that are disclaimed. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements based on our current forecasts and expectations of future events. These statements should be considered estimates only, and actual results may differ materially. During today's call, we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures as outlined by SEC guidelines. Unless otherwise noted, all income statement-related financial measures will be non-GAAP other than revenue. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures and definitions of non-GAAP financial measures are found within the financial tables of our earnings release and appendix of today's presentation. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Kenny Dichter.
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
Thank you, Keith, and thanks to all of you for joining us today ahead of Veterans Day, the National Day of remembrance. I wanted to say a special thank you to all of our veterans who so honorably served our country. We are incredibly fortunate to have many veterans in our ranks, including pilots, mechanics, corporate staff, executive leadership, our Board and, of course, our members. As has been the driving force since we founded Wheels Up, we continued to disrupt private aviation. We are building a technology-driven marketplace platform, connecting a robust demand with fragmented supply. This is similar to how Uber disrupted the traditional taxi and limousine market and how Airbnb created value in vacation homes. The unprecedented demand that the private aviation industry is experiencing today and the related stresses it's putting on the available supply further validates our strategy and the tremendous opportunity that exists in the market. We have plenty of positives to recognize this quarter, including our record growth. With our trusted and iconic brand, we are a leading demand generator in our space. Our membership programs and other flight options like shared flights make private aviation more accessible than ever and are resonating with consumers. Our Wheels Up events and exclusive partner benefits continue to add important value to member experience and support retention. In addition, our public listing has given us a very strong balance sheet with over $500 million of cash and essentially 0 debt. We are very well positioned to invest in our business and build on our significant first-mover advantage. With that backdrop, let me share some highlights from this morning's earnings release. We reported over $300 million in revenue in the third quarter, setting another quarterly revenue record, up 50% year-over-year. Revenue for the first 9 months was…
Vinayak Hegde
Analyst
Thank you, and I'm delighted to speak with all of you today. Also thank you, Kenny and the Wheels Up Board for having the confidence and faith in me as the President of Wheels Up. It's truly an honor. I joined Wheels Up to execute on the next and arguably the most critical phase of our disruptive strategy, which is to build the industry's first technology-driven marketplace like Amazon, Airbnb and Uber have done. For us, it entails a simple user interface that is easy for customers to search, discover and book. It also means creating an easy way for operators to list their aircraft availability and increase utilization of their fleet. What's incredible is the industry, despite all its complexity, still largely depends on analog and manual processes to operate today. It should be a little surprised that today's strong demand environment has masked the industry's inability to scale expensive assets are very underutilized through empty repositioning legs, ad hoc maintenance scheduling efficient communications, resulting in a suboptimal experience both for customers and operators. It is important to understand the logistics of our industry are very complicated. More than half of our customers book within a week of their travel. We fly to thousands of airports. Unlike commercial airlines where schedules are set more than 6 months in advance, our schedules have to be developed and optimized very close to the departure time of the flights. We have to manage a platter of different aircraft types and sizes. Now you heard Kenny touch and program changes we announced to preserve the integrity of the service we deliver to every customer, whether legacy or new to Wheels Up. And I would like to take a moment to provide some color on what that really means. Supply is the industry's biggest…
Eric Jacobs
Analyst
Thank you, Vinayak. As Kenny noted, we are very pleased with our strong revenue growth this year with third quarter revenue up 55% year-over-year to $302 million. This reflects the unprecedented demand we are experiencing as well as the success of our membership programs and our broad-based delivery capability. Let me start by providing more details about our revenue, which is broken down across 4 main categories: membership, flight, aircraft management and others. Membership revenue grew 35% year-over-year in the quarter. We believe membership revenue is highly visible and largely recurrent. Given our 80% retention rate for Core and Business members generally and approximately 90% of those Core and Business members that purchase blocks. In the third quarter, we added 860 net new members with active members growing 45% year-over-year. We were very pleased to have crossed 11,000 member thresholds, finishing the quarter with 11,375 Active Members. Our Core and Business offerings with their guaranteed availability and cap rates across all asset classes, continue to resonate with the market, particularly as market pricing increased. That was a key driver of growth in the quarter, along with the initial success of our AmEx partnership that Kenny commented on earlier. Kenny and Vinayak touched on the recent changes to our programs. We will essentially be managing near-term membership growth based on our expected ability to deliver. We believe this will be temporary, however, as we execute on our plan to increase our delivery capabilities. Turning to flight revenue. Flight revenue was up 3% sequentially this quarter and up 56% year-over-year. We think the best way to model flight revenue is to multiply Live Flight Legs by Revenue per Live Legs. Live Flight Legs were up 8% sequentially from the second quarter and up 52% year-over-year. We continue to see strong leisure demand…
Operator
Operator
[Operator Instructions]. Our first question for today comes from Sheila Kahyaoglu from Jefferies.
Sheila Kahyaoglu
Analyst
Nice quarter on the revenue side. Maybe few details adjusted EBITDA guidance being lower very nicely in terms of the different components lowering it. So maybe can you talk about the timing of the improvement, given fleet labor, I think you mentioned was 150 basis points that might take a while as you focus on pilots and competition there and some of the supply chain shortages. So kind of how do you expect the improvement post Q4? Because I think Q4 is about a 15% EBITDA loss.
Eric Jacobs
Analyst
Sure. Thanks for the question. So in terms of essentially where we're going from an adjusted EBITDA perspective, we'll give 2022 guidance next quarter. But as I said in my prepared remarks, essentially, EBITDA is going to be down in the low to -- sorry, contribution margin is going to be down to the low to mid-single digits in the next couple of quarters. So as you think about how that flows through from an EBITDA perspective, that means essentially going forward, at least for the first half of next year, that we'll see that trend until some of these things kick in. As I also said last quarter, we're investing $20 million to $25 million in pilots, $15 million in technology. So that's also impacting Q4 into the beginning of next year as well.
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
Yes. And Sheila, this is Kenny. Thanks for the question. We're taking a long view of the customer here. And ultimately, I believe that this market has plenty of pricing power and elasticity in it. But our membership program, membership has its privileges, and we want to take care of that customer through this transitory period where we're seeing spike in pricing. So again, playing the long game on the member. And I think Eric laid it out nicely.
Sheila Kahyaoglu
Analyst
Yes. No, I hear you on that, Kenny. And I think that's a fair point, you're announcing a price increase of 4% taking effect on December 1. So kind of is that enough? Or do you see more? And how do you think your competitors are changing their price?
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
Yes. Well, we've already seen our competitors move pricing more drastically than we are. We're moving pricing 8% to 13% where we need to move it, which is in our entry level, the King Air, the Light Jets. We're leaving our cap rates on the mid and super mid because we have some room there. But the net-net is we want to always provide value. Listen, can somebody argue that Amazon Prime can double their rate on what they charge their customer for that great value and great service. The answer is yes, they probably lose a couple of percentage points, but nothing material. We could move our pricing even higher, but we've made a conscious decision to keep that value on our member really focused on the member. Eric?
Eric Jacobs
Analyst
Yes. So Sheila, in my remarks, I talked about how the Core members and people that buy blocks after December 1 will see the higher pricing pretty much immediately. But about over half of our members have a block today. And I also said during my remarks that we expect very strong fourth quarter block sales as existing members take advantage of this 1-month period, where they can buy blocks and build rates. So it's going to take a longer period of time that to kick in.
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
I'm going to have Vinayak drop a bullet point here. I'm talking about Amazon. Vinayak lived with Amazon and Airbnb through sort of peak surge demand. Vinayak?
Vinayak Hegde
Analyst
Thanks, Kenny. Sheila, I think when it comes to pricing, your question was also on competitors. So we do monitor competitive pricing very closely. We do believe that the opportunity for us with respect to pricing is in the smaller cabin sizes, as we mentioned. Pricing is a big opportunity for us. That is why we are building a team around it. We hired Julia Zhang from T-Mobile who has expertise in both subscription and pricing. So that allows us to figure out like how to price it, not just at the cap level, but an individual trip level that enables us to maximize profitability in the long run, while making sure we are increasing customer lifetime value. But the trick for us is to move on from more static price to automated pricing even though there is a cap, so that we can actually manage the pricing at a per-trip level.
Operator
Operator
Our next question for today comes from Hunter Keay from Wolfe Research.
Hunter Keay
Analyst
Eric, what type of planes are you going to buy in the fourth quarter? How many are you buying? And how are you going to finance the acquisition?
Eric Jacobs
Analyst
So we're going to buy couple of planes this quarter, mostly on the smaller side. We're not out there buying Globals and Gulfstreams and plans to sell. So that's the part -- and it's not going to be a significant amount. I mean, our guidance that we have for EBITDA -- sorry, for CapEx is same and true. We're -- what we are doing is we are investing in GRPs -- long-term GRPs for both our third-party fleet and our second-party fleet. So that allows us to lock up longer-term aircraft from third parties once again in a very asset-like manner.
Hunter Keay
Analyst
Okay. And then how temporary is this initiative to manage the membership? Sorry for the noise in the background. And is there a point where you contemplate maybe closing off to new members until the supply and all catch up like just did?
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
Yes, this is Kenny. Thanks for the question. What we've done to protect our current membership is we put a moratorium, we're taking new members in, but there's a 90-day delay in when you can book unless you put $200,000 down for nonpeak access or $400,000 down for full access. So it's critical that we manage through this transitory period, again, 90 days is where we kind of confer the front end and the back end of the business on operations and took a look at what forecasted demand looks like, and that's the answer for now. But incredibly bullish and look, we're filling demand as we speak, the tens of millions of dollars of demand that we could take in and this is just one way that we're tempering it for our current members, but more important, keeping the business open for new business when we believe we can service it the way we service our current.
Operator
Operator
Our next question for today comes from Gary Prestopino from Barrington Research.
Gary Prestopino
Analyst
This may be a little bit of a long question, but could you maybe just segment out what these price changes are for the various levels of membership your Connect, Core and Business just so we have that clear as to where we're going here with what you're doing to raise prices?
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
I would say on the membership pricing, we've left that in place as it is. So the price that you in a program and the rates, that hasn't moved. I'm going to hand it over to Eric to give you a little bit of color. Or actually, Eric or Vinayak you can -- one of you can take this in terms of the pricing on the King Air where it's moving and where the Light Jet is moving and maybe just reiterate where we are in mid, super-mid, large?
Eric Jacobs
Analyst
I'll take it, Vinayak. So in terms of the turboprop, the King Air, essentially we're raising the cap rates 8% effective December 1. For the Light Jet, that's going to be raised 13%. Once again, we're talking about the cap rates. We price each individual trip that could be up to the cap rate or at the cap rate. And then for the midsized jets, we're only raising at $100, which is about 1%. And then we're leaving the super mid and large cabin cap rates as is.
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
And I think one of the big values -- this is Kenny, is our one-way pricing. That's why people are joining and that's why our retention rates are what they are. We have -- we're delivering tremendous value for our customers. And again, as I said before on the top of the call, we could take more pricing. The market is giving us the ability in our member is giving us more ability and we'll pay up, and we are sticking with that. Program changes, Eric, if you want to cover a couple of those, or Vinayak, if you want to add some color here. But like I said, from a personal perspective, it's now 21 years for me in this business. From a TAM perspective and a demand perspective, all of the public numbers that are out there for everybody to look at are at historic levels.
Eric Jacobs
Analyst
Just on the program changes. Essentially, what we're doing is having to call out to be a little longer. And that -- what that allows us to do is to have more time and to make able to match supply and demand. So very subtle changes. As Vinayak said, we used a lot of data and analytics to evaluate that, and that will help us sort of improve profitability.
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
And one thing we're in front of is the technology hiring is not easy. And we're dealing with -- put an A+ team on the field. Vinayak, maybe you could give some color on how technology plays in here because, again, the way that we're set on first party, second party and third party building a marketplace with the demand that we're forecasting out in 2022 and '23 and just what the industry is telling us, technology is going to play a big role in the unlock both on supply, demand and efficiency. So Vinayak?
Vinayak Hegde
Analyst
Yes. Thanks, Kenny. Just in terms of technology of pricing since the question was on pricing. As we said, like we are going to build systems very similar to how Amazon or Airbnb did where we do competitive price monitoring, so we can understand pricing by competitors on a more real-time basis so we can take that into account. In terms of other program changes, also, there are 3 components, right? One is the call-out period, one is the price that Eric talked about, but also minimums, like what is the minimum block that we have on a per-cabin class basis. So that also actually helps us with the margin. In terms of technology, on the buyer side, as we build the new app, we are going to have features which will enable us to kind of understand more real time what other trips are there that day such that we can figure out how to nudge people to kind of take the trip, as I mentioned, in my written reports, where we can actually use the same plane by nudging people to take a flight earlier by an hour or later by an hour such that we can improve utilization in a very big way. And when it comes to technology on the buyer side, as you know, our FMS system, we're building global aircrafts seach engine, that will enable us to find the right aircraft at the right place. So we -- FMS is also used by many third-party operators, our FMS. And if we know that someone needs a flight from, let's say, Las Vegas to Seattle, if there is already a plane going from Las Vegas to, let's say, Vancouver, British Columbia, we can identify that plane and put people on that flight because it would have come as an empty leg and where we can make margins. So this kind of global aircraft search capability is going to one, make more return or yield maximization for the operator, but also give us more supply. So we're really excited about that.
Operator
Operator
Our next question comes from Aaron Kessler from Raymond James.
Aaron Kessler
Analyst
A couple of questions maybe on M&A opportunity with -- I assume a lot of the competitors are facing a lot of the same supply constraints in the industry. Do you view this as maybe an opportunity to acquire some of the smaller players in the market and kind of roll up the space a little bit more? And just maybe back on the pricing quickly. If we think about kind of the weighted average increase in pricing based on your mix today, kind of what does that work out to?
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
I'll take the first piece. I'll let Eric take the second piece. I might even take a swing at a little piece of the second. But on the first one, listen, our timing on the public offering, we rang the bell on July 14. What did that do? We put $656 million worth of fresh cash on the balance sheet, and we have a public currency. So when you think about the opportunity to do M&A, we have all of the ammunition. I think Eric pointed out, that we have essentially 0 debt. We paid off our founding debt on the King Air. So we have tremendous deal capacity. This is a fragmented industry. Again, we're 3% of the $30 billion TAM that exists today. So plenty of fragmented folks here that are small, medium and even large out there for us to look at and partner. And again, when you're talking to an entrepreneur and I get to talk to them all the time in our space. Having currency New York Stock Exchange stock plus capital on the balance sheet, if we have all of the ingredients to do just what you asked, which is look at every M&A opportunity out there, we're focused on asset life which is our folks that have access to airplanes, control the scheduling and we can take that in and look at how that can enhance our fleet overnight. Number two, when we think about the -- just the overall pricing, the mid and the super mid, we haven't yet -- or on a daily basis, we hit the cap sometimes. But we've got plenty of room on the mid to super mid and large take pricing without changing our cap rates. And Eric, I don't know if that answers the question in full there, but there is more margin to be had with the mid, super mid, and large because, again, if we want to move up closer to our cap rates in those categories, like you're taking margin without taking pricing. And so Aaron, it's hard to give you an exact number because there is some time that it's going to take for some of this to kick it. But think about it this way, 40% of our members or Core members, which is the most of our -- a vast majority of our members will see an increased effect of 12 1 or a little bit more than about 75% of their flights. And that increase is a 4% blended increase, and that's the cap rate. So it's going to be a percentage of that less than that 4% depending on when they fly. So the rents aren't going to see an increase until their blocks expire. So think about that remaining 60% is going to come in more towards the back half of the year into the end of next year.
Operator
Operator
Our next question for today comes from Marvin Fong from BTIG.
Marvin Fong
Analyst
Most have been asked and answered actually. But perhaps you could give us your view on when you think your pilot shortage might come in the balance and you'd be able to get all the pilots that you want to? Are we thinking by the end of the year? Or will this persist into '23? And then just a question on membership. I mean, do you expect the program changes that you've implemented to the press membership as maybe these people move on to mainline line? Or do you do you expect your membership trend to kind of hold and people to accept the changes you've made?
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
Yes. I'm going to take just the first piece, and I'm going to hand this to the Vinayak. But just on the pilots, we're -- we gave our first to all of our control fleet pilots. And really, we did a celebration ramp for all of our pilots and folks on equity, RSUs. We're the first company again as one of the advantages of being a public firm to be able to issue equity and have our pilots riding along with us on the success of the company. I think in this time, with this demand, we're going to have to get more competitive on the pilot front, we're prepared to be there. I think a lot of it is lifestyle and we're in motion on putting some great lifestyle programs together here, some new benefits as it relates to how we -- how the pilots eat, how they -- where they stay and all of the special things that pilots need, especially when they're working as hard as they are out there. We just think, again, like M&A question before, we're really uniquely positioned to beef up our pilot ranks. We have a couple of hundred requisitions that we're going to attack over the next 30, 60, 90 days and we expect in '22 to be not only in balance, but in great position to have our first-party aircraft crude to the way that we want to have in crude. And again, at the end of the day, the second party, we're going to enhance our relationship with the 170 who are our program, maybe 50 or 60 airplanes that are really, really charter friendly. We're going to enhance our relationship with those folks that own those planes, where we can gain more scheduling control. And then again, the third party, that's where we really want to focus, and that's really why Vinayak, I want you to this, technology is the big unlock here. Think Airbnb and think Uber and how important supply is there. And again, Vinayak, this is your area, how do you pick up at the back half of that question.
Vinayak Hegde
Analyst
Thank you, Kenny. On the back half of the question with respect to membership. When we did this price changes, we did it very thoughtfully. We looked at competitive prices. We looked at our membership cohorts. The broader industry, it's well recognized that what is happening in the industry as people said, other competitors are also figuring out their memberships. We announced our program changes thoughtfully while making sure we are delivering outstanding service. We really have two big types of membership, Core membership and Connect membership. What is really happening is more and more customers are seeing a better product market fit with our Core memberships. So while there may be changes to membership patterns with respect to Core and Connect, you're going to see more and more people use our Core memberships and our retention rates, especially when the are blocks are very, very high. So the way we think about it is kind of the total value of our entire membership base, not just the number of members. And we are trying to optimize the total value of our entire membership base. And we believe more and more people are liking our Core membership program. So we may see some movement with respect to Connect versus Core. But overall, we are happy with the growth in membership and retention. Our retention numbers for our Core and Business customers is incredibly high. And we believe that we'll continue to see that as we think through the market in the short and medium term.
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
I'm going to have Eric give you a bullet or two. One more bullet on that from Eric.
Eric Jacobs
Analyst
Yes. Thanks. So I think there were 2 sort of sub questions. One was regarding pilots and timing. So look, as we said in our remarks, it's going to -- we're trying to hire 100-plus pilots in the next couple of quarters here. You got to get them trained. Training slots are something that we have to consider as well as the third party is going to take longer to solve. So that's why our contribution margin will be impacted for the next couple of quarters. The other question you had is about membership and whether it be depressed. Look, it's still for the next 2 months, we're out there, we're selling memberships, obviously there's some -- a little bit of [indiscernible] for 90 days, but we'll reassess that at the beginning of the year and see how we're doing in terms of some of the supply unlock and whether or not we can accelerate something there.
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
The good news is we're one of the only majors that is open for business and people are looking for programmatic lift into 2022. Yes, the doors are open, and we're welcoming them in. And like I said, with the caveat that over the next 2, 3 months, we're going to govern when they can fly in the short term.
Vinayak Hegde
Analyst
I just wanted to say 1 thing. The new members when they come in, they still have access to -- especially the Core members will have access to Core -- to Shared flights and Hot flights. It's the individual flights where there is the 90-day governor in place.
Operator
Operator
Our next question comes from Michael Bellisario from Baird.
Michael Bellisario
Analyst
Just on that same new member topic. Can you tell how many new private flyers are signing up with you versus someone or some business switching from a competitor?
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
Yes. I think that we're seeing -- look, the TAM that we laid out when we marketed this deal in a public way, it is showing up. And our partnership with American Express, the early returns there super strong, amazing amount of downloading our app and getting familiar with Wheels Up. And I want to double click on our partnership with Delta. What we're doing with Delta cross-selling business with their business sellers and our business unit UP For Business, just I want to say, a tremendous interest in our space. And again, we're seeing the -- that TAM really open up here. And again, the evidence for me would be how successful the early returns are at American Express and really over the last year with Delta, interest level and conversion from folks that weren't programmatic private flyers prior. So I think it's the beginning of a real open-up, unlock.
Michael Bellisario
Analyst
Got it. That's helpful. And then just on the revenue side, do you have an estimate of how much revenue you had to forego in the quarter and then how that maybe progressed throughout the quarter and so far in October and November? Just really trying to understand how much demand is being that in terms of dollars?
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
When we look at it, it's not an exact science, but we know who's searching and we know who has governors on their memberships and what the bookings are. I believe that there's tens of millions of dollars that have spilled and again, that may be a conservative estimate on what we're looking at here. When I think about the industry as a whole, I think there's hundreds of millions of dollars industry-wide that's being still -- that will be serviced. By the way, we talk about Travis Kalanick at Garrett Camp when they figured out at Uber that the American car was parked 23 hours and 30 minutes a day, the business jet in North America, the rest of the world has parked 23 hours and 40 minutes a day. So there's plenty of unlocked. These planes are not flying like the Boeing or the Airbuses. Technology, more new pilot starts coming into our space, there's tremendous airframe capacity without having to pull from the OEMs at this point in time.
Operator
Operator
Our final question for today comes from Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley.
Brian Nowak
Analyst
Just want to sort of follow-up around user growth and member growth. You have a lot of great data on elasticity over time on your users. Just talk to us about how you're thinking about new user growth the next 9 months or so, just sort of navigating through this challenging time? And then when you made the comment about low single-digit contribution margins, what is the underlying user growth assumption to get to that low single-digit number?
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
I'll start out and thanks for the question. One is, again, I just want to highlight for the call that we're 3% of the $30 billion space today, and there's plenty of room for us to grow in the traditional sense. I think when I think about opening up that TAM, I think about the sharing, I think about the buy the seat. If you look at the pricing that we can give to our members on a New York, Vancouver route where you got [indiscernible] it could be $600, $700 a seat for that round trip. If you look at it divided by 8 seats on a King Air, you may be paying $100 to $200 more each flight. So you got 2 or 3x versus commercial, which is very appealing from a time and space. And that really opens up the TAM to that 15 million and 20 million people that could afford it for less than $1,000 per leg. And we think there's a tremendous amount of that out there. I'm going to hand it over to Vinayak and then Eric will finalize things up with where the margins are. But I just want to say that for the whole call, thank you to everybody that kicked in a question here. We have an unbelievable opportunity with that 3% was spilling demand. And if we can really focus, Vinayak will focus Amazon like focus on the member and take care of that member, that member is going to take care of us, and the growth is going to take care of itself. So Vinayak, maybe you could fill in last question a couple of bullets? And Eric, we'll have you bring in last.
Vinayak Hegde
Analyst
So thank you, Kenny. On the membership growth, I don't think we're going to disclose the growth numbers right now, but we have a clear target in place and a plan to actually get there. There are 2 things with respect to membership growth. What we are seeing is membership growth as you see through the numbers is continuing to grow. The second thing is the cohorts are actually spending more than they spent before. So we see very healthy membership growth. Third, they're actually booking flights earlier in terms of -- from the time they become a member to actually booking a flight. The last thing I wanted to say is, I mean, we are doing this with fairly flat sales and marketing budget right now. We do believe that we can turn this spigot on for demand when needed. And the way we get demand is we do lead gen marketing as well, and we have not aggressively done that because of the demand we have. We feel confident about the membership growth that we can get. And additionally, our partnership with companies like American Express are huge drivers to new membership growth. And Eric can comment about like when we talk about 2022, we'll give more color with respect to that.
Eric Jacobs
Analyst
Thanks, Vinayak. You're right, we're not going to give -- I'm sorry, we're not going to give specific guidance for user growth, but I will highlight some things that I said in my prior remarks. Essentially, our Core and Business memberships are resonating stronger than Connect because of the guaranteed rates and the program rules. And so we're seeing upticks from Connect to Core when people are doing at a rate that's double that we've traditionally seen. User growth with the fact that we're not allowing folks to fly over the next 90 days is going to decrease. It's really focused on the membership approach is what we're focused on. So I'll leave it at that.
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
Yes. And I'll just double click in on that. I think if you were in an environment that didn't have the demand surge that we are seeing today, you have a lot more a la carte available. But right now, what we set up 8 years ago, this membership program, the value of that membership today with certain guarantees on lift it just puts us in a position, again, Vinayak and team, I'm counting on you to open up that supply-demand latency that's out there. But in the meanwhile, as Eric said, the trade that has the most value today and has the most liquidity, if you will, is the membership. And that's really what we're seeing here, and we're excited about it. With that said, I think we're at the end of the call. Is that the last question?
Operator
Operator
That is the last question. Yes, I will hand back over to Kenny Dichter for any closing remarks.
Kenneth Dichter
Analyst
All right. I'm going to go quick and I know people have a lot to do today. Thanks for joining us today and taking the time to better understand our vision, our business and our long-term strategy. I've been now in this business for 21 years, and I'm as bullish about our space as I've been since the day I started. We are building an innovative technology-enabled marketplace to optimize fragmented and underutilized supply and connect it with a large and growing addressable market. All of this is supported by a trusted and iconic brand. We firmly believe that the leaders we have hired and the investments we're making in operations, technology, product development, customer service and most important, our pilots, will position Wheels Up as the undisputed leader in our industry. We also believe we'll create significant shareholder value in the years ahead, and I look forward to continuing the up journey with all of you. Thank you. Alex, thank you for running a great call.
Operator
Operator
Thank you very much. That's no problem. Thank you all for joining today's call. You may now disconnect.