Things in the Sky

There are four airlines that come out with monthly PRASM estimates at the beginning of every month, and here are the latest results. They look pretty good – the declines for Continental and US Airways were better than in the past. Southwest and JetBlue’s results were a bit worse, but both of those airlines had strong performance in October 2008.

Comparisons for this quarter will be a bit tricky, though. For example, Southwest CFO Laura Wright said during the company’s most recent earnings call:

“…last October we were actually up 14% on a unit revenue basis. November was up 1% and December was up 12%. There’s some weird things going on with the holidays, as you are probably aware. Last year Thanksgiving was very late in the month of November with a lot of the return travel in December, so when you look at November and December this year, I think the December comp will be more difficult just because of the holiday mismatch….So I think December is going to be a more difficult comparison and certainly October is a tougher one because of the great results we had a year ago.”

I’d still expect, though that we’ll continue to see better numbers in the coming months as things improve (hopefully) and as more comparisons are made off the crummy numbers of a year ago.