Selected sentences from Q3 Conference Call ...the ongoing demand environment, which remains very stable.
Aeroplan membership continues to grow. Gross billings and redemptions also surpassed third quarter of ’22 levels
Our domestic and trans-border revenues rose 3% and 23% respectively, but most importantly are the yield gains. Demand continue to track above 2019 levels. This combined with the capacity constraints at the global industry level have continued to favor the yield environment, especially for our international markets.
As we look to Q4 2023 and early signals into 2024, we continue to witness stable demand indicators
With this latest prepayment, we are bringing our unencumbered asset pool value to approximately $6.7 billion, excluding the value of Aeroplan.
This rating (Ba2) is one notch below our highest Moody’s rating, which was in place prior to the pandemic.
Adjusted EBITDA approached $3.5 billion at the end of the third quarter compared to $1.1 billion in the same period last year, and was 16% higher than that in 2019. Interesting to note is that our equity value as of October 20 has declined 12% versus the same day in ’22 and is about 50% of the same day in 2019.
We remain confident with our full year ’23 adjusted EBITDA guidance and at this point expect to land in the higher end of that range.
Aeroplan continues to deliver record performance. By the end of the third quarter, we had doubled our active member base since the program was purchased in 2019.
On the booking curve, it’s in line with expectations. We see relatively strong demand for Q4 in almost every single geography that we operate in, almost every single segment that we operate in……..; but in terms of demand, it’s quite stable, in line with expectations, and we’re not seeing any major slowdown at this point in time.
What we’re seeing so far is we’ve seen a shift to international markets, we’ve observed this shift for the better part of the last two years,
so corporate recovery relative to 2019 continues to be in the same range, in the minus-25% to minus-30% range on the managed side,
Just on the booking side, on the booking curve on leisure, again we continue to pace with comparing ourselves versus 2022, 2023. …..Then we’re also tracking international leisure demand we’re tracking it not only for Q4, Q1, but also for Q2 and Q3 2024, and again we are at pace or, in some cases, actually above where we were last year, so we’re feeling reasonably confident that the leisure demand indicators continue to be stable.
What we’re seeing essentially is as an individual, as a customer becomes more engaged in Aeroplan progressively, they’re more likely to have higher volume on Air Canada, purchase higher quality tickets, and more likely to purchase those tickets directly versus via third party distribution sources
As an aside, we actually--in this environment, we actually do quite well with interest income, return on that cash, so it’s a little bit of a cheap option on liquidity that we do have, given the return on our deposits almost matches some of our fixed rate cost on debt,
our priority is deleveraging at this point in time. We’ll look at other ways of providing returns to shareholders in due course, but right now, our entire focus is on deleveraging.
The impact of Tel Aviv is relatively inconsequential. I mean, Tel Aviv is an important market for Air Canada, …..but from a full system basis, it’s about 30 basis points of--decimal 30 basis points of capacity, so it’s really inconsequential.