I’m back to writing about brand today, an often-overlooked portion of the airline experience.

To be successful, airlines must differentiate themselves to attract customers. A few have truly differentiated networks, so that’s their competitive advantage. But most airlines, competing against each other with similar seats and amenities for basically the same customers, have to find and commit to another thing that makes them special.

That is brand, or more specifically, brand promise. Faced with choices, I think consumers will choose not the best airline, but the one that most often delivers the experience they have come to expect.

Successful airlines are self-aware — clear about what they are, and what they are not — and consistent in delivering on their promises. This must happen through the whole travel experience, from booking to check-in to the airplane. And while they can make tweaks to these brand promises, many of the best airlines stick to their overarching strategy through good times and bad.

But this takes clarity, discipline, and commitment. As the industry as a whole has moved up-market in response to post-pandemic customer preferences, there has been this tendency for every airline to start chasing “best-in-class,” or something like it, all under the banner of “premium.” Of course, we all know that budget airlines have their versions of premium products — I’m not saying that premium products have no place on LCCs. But the tone, the spirit, the vibe of premium on any given airline has to be the right fit for that airline.

Take too big a swing on your premium product, create something too aspirational for your base — or worse, strike a weird balance between premium and budget-conscious — and you risk muddying your identity, confusing (and potentially losing) your customers and damaging your brand.

This is a big reason I harp on American. It offers a fine product with the bones to compete with Delta and United1, but I fear its mid-level executives for so long served two masters: a debt-focused CFO, and commercial leaders who know a premium airline has to spend money to make it.

That’s enough about American. I want to discuss two other airlines that have made major product announcements recently. Each is seeking to match premium trends and increase revenues.

One airline designed a product that matches its brand promise — the new offering isn’t the world’s best, but it aligns with customer expectations, and I think that makes it the right move for its target market. The other airline’s new product is more luxurious than the first carrier’s, but I don’t think it matches its brand promise. I think that mismatch makes for a weaker product.

Can you guess the two airlines I’m talking about today?

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Something weird is happening at United Airlines when it comes to how customers interact with the brand online.

United, which is very familiar with being the main character on social media,1 might now be the coolest airline online.

Granted, it’s a low bar. Many premium airlines (Emirates and Singapore among them) take what I consider a hands-off and outdated (or is it stuffy?) approach to social media engagement. United takes a different tack, giving wide latitude to the 45 employees on its brand marketing team to produce sticky content that connects with Gen Z and anyone who likes a cheeky, creative and relevant brand.

“We are really trend-driven,” Maggie Schmerin, United’s chief advertising officer, told me in an interview. “We feel strongly that for a brand in 2026 to be relevant, you really have to be tapped into culture.”

The videos United makes to tease and announce new routes show its commitment to cool.2 The airline began producing them just after the pandemic to promote its strategy to fly to places U.S. carriers rarely reach, such as Ulaanbaatar, and Kaohsiung. From the beginning, the teaser videos have been innovative, filled with subtle but guessable clues about new markets the airline would announce the next day.

Still, by brand marketing standards, they were simple. You probably remember this one from a few years ago, starring network guru Patrick Quayle and filmed on an airplane. This year’s teaser — to announce United’s new destinations like Catania, Ibiza, Ljubljana, Valencia, Luxembourg, and Marseille — is way bigger and better, with actors, a concept, and many nods to pop culture.

I love my subscribers, but most of you aren’t the target audience for these teasers. This is more for people who love popular culture but perhaps find air travel intimidating.

“There were elements of ‘Survivor’ in there, and elements of ‘Love Island,’” Schmerin said. “Even the fact that we did it in a cottage was in honor of ‘Heated Rivalry’ — one of the biggest shows on TV this year that had cottage as a major plot point.”

As a proponent of brand marketing and advertising, I like United’s approach. No airline can succeed without getting the basics right, but brand is important too. I’m always surprised when certain carriers ignore how passengers feel about their brands, perhaps believing (as a certain former CCO used to say) that the network is the product.

When a carrier can spend the time and money to make its brand stand out, I think that’s an advantage in any competitive market, including contested one-stop connections. Judging by how many insiders at other airlines have told me they’re impressed by — and sometimes jealous of — United’s plucky social media presence, I’d say United is doing it right.

This has been a long road

It has not always been like this at United.

Schmerin and her deputy Meg Mitchell, United’s global creative director, joined in 2017, the same year the infamous Dr. Dao was dragged off an airplane at O’Hare. Back then, United was simply trying to communicate on social media that it didn’t suck as much as some consumers thought.3

“If you went back and looked at a word cloud to find the most popular words that United Airlines used on social media a decade ago, you would see a lot of words like, ‘sorry’ and ‘apologize’,” Schmerin said. “Social media was primarily a customer service channel. We came in and said, ‘That’s important too. We totally appreciate that.’ Oftentimes, in their moment of need, social is the fastest place to help someone. But this is also the place where we can show people that we’re more than just this metal tube getting you from point A to point B.”

United improved its customer satisfaction scores under Oscar Munoz and then-president Scott Kirby between 2017 and 2020. But Schmerin and Mitchell understood that they couldn’t fully change consumer sentiment so quickly, because there’s usually a lag between when an airline improves and when people understand it has improved.

Plus, while the experience was better, United still didn’t have much to promote. The airline had yet to announce many of its ambitious passenger experience plans, including in-seat screens, Starlink, and retrofitted interiors. So just as network planners return to their strongest markets when they need their mojo back, Schmerin and Mitchell examined what they had inherited to find their strongest assets. They went with sports sponsorships.

“We have dozens of those, and we said, ‘let’s start having fun in the comment section,’” Schmerin said. “We fly these teams. We are fans of these teams, and when you get some small wins like that, and you’re able to shop that around the halls at United and say, ‘this is what we’re after,’ you inspire people. I think they say, ‘OK, I can see where we want to go,’ and you just build up from there.”

By 2019, United was celebrating the Chicago Bears’ 100th anniversary by dressing the replica dinosaur in O’Hare’s Terminal 1 in a giant Bears jersey. It even temporarily added the Bears’ colors and font to gate numbers at the airport.

Perhaps that stuff changed how customers saw the brand, but in those early years, Schmerin and Mitchell said they had other priorities too. Yes, they wanted small wins to earn buy-in from high-level executives who controlled budgets, but they also wanted to sway all employees and get them excited about working for an airline on the upswing.

“We really feel strongly that people need to understand where we’re going, so they can help advocate for us, and they can understand, ‘OK, this is the type of brand that we want to be,”’ Schmerin said.

United does things its way

Since then, the team has probably had enough success that they don’t need to do as much lobbying. Still, Schmerin and Mitchell meet regularly with employee groups to screen upcoming television advertisements, social media campaigns, and billboards, and to talk about future plans. They don’t want to hide anything.

“I think there’s a feeling that social media or marketing is secretive,” Schmerin said. [Executives say,] ‘you’ll see it when you see it on TV or when it’s on social media.’ We take the exact opposite approach.”

They now have an advocate at the very top: Scott Kirby. United’s CEO has told me for years he tries to set a tone for the airline without micromanaging. The advertising team has noted that Kirby is a deeply competitive man who wants to be the best at everything, including brand positioning.

“Scott always talks about the biggest and best airline in the history of aviation, and he started to add biggest, best, and coolest airline in the history of aviation,” Mitchell said.

Kirby sets the tone in two other ways. First, he doesn’t fear mistakes as much as many CEOs, believing United should take chances so long as it can recover if things go wrong. As other brands have learned, social media teams occasionally misread what the internet wants, leading to major drama and a temporary hit to the brand. (Just ask McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski).4

Second, Kirby wants to zig when others zag. In the Jeff Smisek era, which ended in 2015, United was best known for copying Delta. One example: After Delta changed how it awarded frequent flyer miles, United did the same.

These days, United copies little. Rather than mimic Delta’s approach to advertising, with its slick commercials featuring famous actors like Viola Davis and Donald Sutherland, United acts more like an upstart trying to break through without spending much money. Even when United is on TV, it often tries to create buzz at what I suspect is a fraction of Delta’s budget.5

Social media, though, is where United really shines. It meets the cool people where they are, often on TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit.

“We’ll post in there and say, ‘All right, Reddit, go do your thing,’” Mitchell said. “People on Reddit want to go deep, and they will spend hours and hours trying to decode everything in there.”

That kind of engagement is exactly what a consumer-facing brand wants.

How does United measure ROI on social media?

Frankly, it doesn’t matter.

Perhaps that’s a little flippant, but United is a Fortune 100 company that made almost $60 billion in operating revenue last year. Even its biggest-budget social media shoots, like the one in the Canadian cabin, are a rounding error on the annual budget.

“This is incredibly efficient marketing and social media for us,” Schmerin said. “We also put some paid dollars behind it on social media, but we only have that reveal video. It makes sense to really promote it for 24 hours. It’s about being as impactful as we can by making really good content that hopefully takes off organically.”

Brands can measure some social media metrics, including video completion rates, shares, and engagement.6 But if the goal is to measure how many viewers buy a ticket within a year, that’s nearly impossible.

Increasingly, though, United’s bean-counters aren’t stressing the small stuff. Just as CFO Mike Leskinen said he can’t measure exactly how much more revenue United captures by spending more on chicken, I don’t think anyone at United cares exactly how many incremental passengers the airline attracts with a viral video.

If people beyond the insular aviation world are talking about an airline’s social media content, Schmerin and Mitchell say they know it’s working.

“I know that we have done something special when we break through outside of just the biggest aviation enthusiasts,” Schmerin said. “When Meg’s getting texts or people are sending me a text that normally wouldn’t hear about our news, that’s when we know that we’ve done something — whether it’s jumping on a trend with a popular show and making a series of memes, or these route videos.”

There’s another important target segment. Airlines measure employee engagement in more sophisticated ways, but executives often have a shorthand way to gauge how much their workers like their jobs: the swag they wear. I’ve noticed how Delta employees — “the airline that puts the cult in culture,” as a former employee says — love wearing hats and shirts with the Widget branding.

I haven’t seen as many United employees wearing the airline’s logo. Who would want to be accosted by angry customers who had a bad experience with their employer?

The advertising team is trying to reverse that. “Scott says all the time he wants people to go to the grocery store wearing a United Airlines T-shirt,” Schmerin said.

Judging how many employees watch, like, and share social media is just about impossible, Schmerin said, but the team tries to measure vibes.

“Just scanning our own social feeds, and seeing the number of employees that share these videos and repost them is something that is really important to us,” she said. “We want to develop content that employees are proud of and excited about.”

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back next week with some non-United content. Also, on Monday and Tuesday, I’ll be in Dallas/Fort Worth for the Oneworld Loyalty Summit. I’m being paid to appear on stage.

Arguing that Chicago should be a one-airline hub market, Scott Kirby says United someday will operate at least 1,000 departures from O’Hare, making it a fortress hub, akin to what Dallas/Fort Worth is to American and Atlanta is to Delta. And, on Wednesday, he doubled down: he told the audience of Chicago-area business leaders at Crain’s Power Breakfast that even though two airlines laying claim to O’Hare keeps prices lower in some markets, they should want United to win.

Before I get to Kirby’s reasoning, let’s discuss his latest estimate of American’s O’Hare losses. Almost a year after telling me that American likely was losing $800 million per year on a run-rate basis (a number American disputed), Kirby has now upped his estimate.

“In the 12 months into Q1, American lost $1.1 billion in Chicago,” he said Wednesday. “That number is going to be bigger for the full year because that’s before their growth push started and before oil prices went up. You can’t do that in the long run, but you can do it in the short term.”

Kirby used to leave his argument there — perhaps he would say that American will fold in Chicago after its CEO (or perhaps its board) tires of the losses and gives up. But this week, Kirby had more to say to the business community about American’s demise: it will be a good for you.

Here’s his argument. American and United fly to too many of the same tiny markets, duplicating each other’s efforts in a way that does nothing for the local economy. Chicago is the nation’s third largest city, but other airports in smaller cities provide far more destination options for local businesses, because they have only one hub carrier, not two. For United to be more effective in Chicago and offer the same schedule breadth as, say, Delta in Atlanta, American needs to get out of the way.

“Chicago should be bigger, but United needs to be at 1,000 flights a day to make that happen,” he said.

It’s a sound argument, I think. In the short term, the FAA is holding United back after it installed movement caps at the airport. But that’s probably a short-term issue. The bigger impediment is American. As long as American maintains it sizable number of O’Hare gates, United will not be able to reach anything close to 1,000 departures.

It should not surprise you that American pushed back on Kirby’s comments.

“We’ve ​heard our competitor ​make a ​lot of predictions ​about our ​presence in ​Chicago,” the airline said. “But ​the ​reality ​is American is growing, investing, and competing for ​Chicago customers and will ​be for years ​and years ​to ​come. ​Our ​competitor’s vision ​for ​O’Hare appears to ​be ​one airline ​with ​less ​competition. That’s ​not ​going to ​happen.”

The statement makes no mention of how much money American is losing in Chicago. Perhaps it does not matter, assuming American wants to maintain its competitive position at any cost.

If American goes, won’t that be bad for Chicago?

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We've reached August, and like many of you, I'm taking a vacation.1 Before I go, I’ll share some of the more interesting things I have learned recently from earnings reports.

Now that airlines have digested and accepted the reality of higher fuel prices, U.S. carriers are once again discussing more prosaic topics in earnings calls, such as th…

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If Scott Kirby’s mantra is “no excuses, sir,” Robert Isom’s must be “any excuse will do.” But like any experienced teacher, parent, or industry observer I see right through it — and I bet you do, too.

The excuse offered last week — for the airline’s dismal guidance for the third quarter (a loss between 10 and 70 cents per diluted share) and a possible loss on the year,1 depending on fuel prices and demand — was that if only the second quarter earnings call had been held three weeks earlier, they would have had better news to share.

If only!

You could hear variations on this theme at least three times and from at least two executives (presumably with serious faces). CFO Devon May told analysts that as recently as July 2, American would have shared that it could make as much as $1.5 billion in pre-tax profit this year.

And here’s Isom: “If we reported earnings just a few weeks ago, our forecast for the remainder of the year would have been potentially to produce results ... four times better than last year,” Isom said.

As you can probably tell, I don’t think highly of this argument and I can’t see why you would either. I know Isom wants to keep his job, but good CEOs don’t cherry-pick data from the few days when President Trump seemed to tire of the conflict with Iran and Iran loosened its grip on the Strait of Hormuz. Good leaders discuss the situation as it is — not how it was a few weeks ago, or how they hoped it would be.

It’s too bad, because I thought Isom’s crummy excuse overshadowed an otherwise reasonable earnings call effort (at least considering the poor guidance). Isom mostly stuck to his talking points, with fewer cliché-riddled answers than usual. He even shared a four-point plan that he said would close the margin gap between American, United, Delta, and the newly resurgent Southwest. All three competitors reported that they’ll be firmly profitable in the third quarter and for the year.

Was something missing from American’s plan?

Yes. I’ll get to that in a moment. First, the good news.

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As I followed United’s second quarter earnings call last week, I think I heard Scott Kirby obliquely share a warning with fellow CEOs: keep prices up, even when fuel prices fall, or you may lose your job — just like Ted Christie, who “stepped down” from Spirit in April 2025 between the airline’s first and second bankruptcies.

Kirby wasn’t that direct, of course. He’s too smart to utter such an inflammatory remark in a public forum. And since only he knows what he meant, I need to be careful as I analyze his words.

But I am a noted Kirby-watcher, and I think I can make the case that Kirby intended to remind competitors what can happen to CEOs who fail to correctly read industry inflection points.

I’ll share what Kirby said, verbatim, and then I’ll discuss what I think it means.

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I don't have much to quibble about from Delta’s second quarter earnings report. Despite very high fuel prices, Delta produced an adjusted operating income of $1.6 billion with an operating margin of 8.8 percent.

Executives promised continued momentum in the third quarter, predicting an operating margin of 11-13 percent, and teased investors with the prospect of even better future results if fuel prices drop and fares remain high. Ed Bastian called sustaining the high fares an “important step towards improving the industry's financial health and earning sustainable returns over time.”

Maybe so, but we won’t know if airlines can keep prices high for some time, because as the old saying goes, you’re only as strong as your weakest competitor.

So today, let’s examine some of the commercial strategies that Delta executives highlighted on their earnings call last Friday, including their future international growth plans, their interest in Los Angeles, and their bullishness on new basic fares for premium cabins.

Oh, and I’ll hit Bastian for some overly patriotic comments.

Growth mostly will come in growing economies. And that’s not the United States.

Even in the best of times, U.S. GDP typically grows in the low single digits per year. Because well-run airlines don't seek to grow capacity faster than GDP in a mature market (unless they have a strategic reason), Delta is looking for other places to put airplanes.

"We think longer term, the domestic market will move with the economy," chief commercial officer Joe Esposito said. "International for us will grow faster than average just because there's a lot of economies that we still don't serve."

One new route will be Atlanta-to-Riyadh, beginning in October. Another should be the long-teased Los Angeles-to-Manila service. There will be others, too.

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When WestJet unveiled its new LOPA last year for some Boeing narrowbodies, I thought the airline made a reasonable decision to shrink legroom in some seats to Wizz Air levels. Even though some passengers would have limited (or perhaps no?) knee room, I considered it a rational solution to an old problem – how to compete with ULCCs that pack seats on airplanes and undercut other carriers on price.

U.S. airlines have had great success with their basic economy products by adding pre-flight restrictions — including limits on flight changes, baggage, and seat selection — while leaving the in-flight experience untouched. All coach passengers receive complimentary drinks and snacks, access to TV and movies, seats with reasonable legroom, and (sometimes) free internet. Why fly Spirit (RIP) if the Big 5 could give them a better experience at the same price?

But WestJet thought that might not be the best approach for its customers.

Last year, as it redesigned the cabins on some previously all-economy aircraft to add premium seats, WestJet decided to slice and dice the coach cabin, effectively ensuring that many basic economy travelers would have a worse onboard experience than others. These airplanes had four versions of coach seats: extra-legroom economy, along with three types of economy class seats, at 30, 29, and 28 inches of pitch (with the tightest room at the back of the aircraft).1

If passengers wanted the old WestJet economy class standard of 30 inches, they’d have to pay extra for it.

“It’s all about segmentation,” WestJet CEO Alexis von Hoensbroech told me last month in an interview in Miami at the World Aviation Festival. “We increased the number of premium seats in front, and we also thought that we need to deliver a product that is primarily servicing price-sensitive people so we introduced a product that is pretty standard at many other airlines, just in the back part of the plane.”

It looked like a possible a win-win. The airline could add more premium seats, while maintaining excellent unit costs. Passengers (at least in an ideal world) could benefit too; the theory was that WestJet could offer more cheap inventory to compete with discounters. “It was generally to allow for very affordable ticket prices for people who just want a seat,” von Hoensbroech said.

Passengers did not see it that way. Many grumbled quietly, but not Amanda Schmidt, who posted a video on TikTok in January showing her 6’3” father (barely) wedged into the seat on a nearly four-hour flight from Edmonton to Toronto. In the original TikTok, Schmidt jokes: if you wanted to put two legs under the seat in front of you, you’d have to pay for the second leg. Global media soon poked at the airline, including the New York Post, which headlined a story: “Infuriated WestJet passenger shows sardine-can seating in new planes”.

Initially, WestJet punched back on social media, saying “these pitches are in line with what you’ll find across North American airlines.” But 10 days later, WestJet aborted its plan; it removed one row to ensure all standard economy seats would have roughly the same (more generous) legroom.

“It’s not just because of the public noise that it created — that’s usually not what drives us — but we also looked at the data,” von Hoensbroech. “We saw that people who were traveling were less likely to buy new tickets, and we thought: that’s not good.”

In hindsight, WestJet’s executives may not have properly weighed how far it flies these aircraft compared to the European low-cost carriers with similar seat pitch.

“We ride those 737s really long, especially during winter,” von Hoensbroech said. “We fly to the Caribbean. We fly four-, five-, six-, seven-, sometimes even eight-hour flights on a 737. That’s tough on the 28-inch seat pitch, and we got the feedback right away. We always knew it was risky. But if you never try, you never find out.”

“I always say: ‘if you never revert a decision, you're not pushing hard enough.’”

Here’s some other news von Hoensbroech and I talked about.

The U.S. demand problem is old news. Now, Cuba is a pain.

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Airlines outside the United States often salivate over the revenue American, Delta, and United capture from their loyalty programs — you’ve read that in this newsletter many times. Yet at an investor day last month, executives from International Airlines Group expressed no envy. In fact, they argued that by one important metric they’re doing better than the Big 3.

That metric is not absolute revenue, because of course, the Big 3 do make a lot of money from loyalty. Delta earned about $8.2 billion last year from its American Express relationship alone, and United and American likely aren’t that far behind. IAG Loyalty1 — which says it has the world's fourth most valuable loyalty business —reported £2.64 billion in loyalty revenue (about $3.5 billion U.S.).

The metric isn’t percentage of total revenue either. On that, IAG earns about 9 percent of its revenue from loyalty, roughly 3 points less than the combined average of Big 3.2

So what is this mysterious metric, and why is IAG Loyalty so bullish?

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When network planners join JetBlue, Marty St. George likes to play them a scene from “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the film adaptation of the David Mamet play about a group of competitive, big-city real estate agents. In St. George’s favorite part, one of the main characters is explaining the rules of a sales contest.

“The punchline is: ‘First prize is a new Cadillac, second prize is a set of steak knives, and third prize is ‘you’re fired,’” St. George said.

St. George isn’t suggesting he’ll fire planners for proposing losing routes (though given the airline’s tenuous financial position, cash-negative routes are not ideal). Instead, he’s reminding them that the No. 3 position in an airline market is worthless, while No. 2 is just OK. In a scale business, the top dog wins a disproportionate portion of the profits — and that’s what JetBlue seeks. Anywhere, really.

“We have never had a focus city where we were reliably No. 1 by a big number,” St. George said. “The joke I said in the meeting was the only place we were reliably No. 1 in the market was in Presque Isle, because we’re the only guy that flies there.”

Now, JetBlue has its chance.

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Between sessions at last week’s IATA General Meeting, in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt in Rio, almost all the attendees were asking me (and others, too) the same two questions:

Will Robert Isom survive the year at American? And when he goes — whether soon or in the future — who will replace him?

I learned more about the who than the when1. The executives I spoke to said the list of candidates is an open secret, at least among the most plugged-in insiders. They said American’s board is likely aware of all of these candidates, if only because members have a duty to plan ahead, whether or not they expect a quick regime change.

I'll share that list with you today, but first I want to touch on the two most common theories about when Isom might go.

The first theory is that Isom will be gone by the end of the year. Many insiders say Isom has failed and probably won’t materially improve American’s profitability any time soon, despite copying Delta and United in a late shift to premium. This group believes that the new passenger experience improvements that Isom recently approved — Starlink internet, the Bollinger champagne and Lavazza coffee — were eleventh-hour attempts to save his job, but they won’t work.

The second theory is more complicated. Here’s the gist: at any company, insiders have healthy egos; they want to remain in control, and they fear reputational damage. To protect themselves, they may prefer not to admit mistakes. Sometimes this makes them fallible, irrational, and incapable of seeing the bigger picture.

Isom has been the board’s guy for a long time. By my count, four board members (of today's 12) remain from 2016, when the board asked Scott Kirby to leave. It's old news, but it’s been clear that Kirby — not Isom — should have been the heir-apparent to Doug Parker. In addition, nine independent directors remain from 2023, the peak of American's post-pandemic self-imposed strategy blunders. Either implicitly or explicitly, the board must have endorsed those moves.

In this theory, insiders wonder whether board members want to give Isom more time to succeed in order to protect their legacies, and perhaps their board positions. As you may recall, some of United's board members (outside of Oscar Munoz) did not fare well after they fired Jeff Smisek in 2015, because at least two major investors started asking questions about the board’s ability. In a Reuters story that year headlined "United Airlines faces board fight over poor performance," the news outlet quoted a research firm expert: "This situation is really all about shaking up what Altimeter/PAR thinks is an entrenched and ineffective board."

Ok, enough theories. Here’s the list.

These four are top candidates. One may not be able to take the job.

Doug Parker

Don't act so surprised.

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If you were following news reports from the IATA Annual General Meeting, you’d think executives spent hours in Rio de Janeiro discussing rising fuel prices, the war in Iran, future mergers and acquisitions, and supply chain woes.1 That stuff matters, but let me assure you: these serious conversations are a tiny part of what happens at this meeting every year. So what does happen?

Well, there’s the serious and sober part, when executives engage — often in dreary, windowless rooms at a convention center — with partners and potential partners about alliances, codeshares, interline agreements, and frequent flyer tie-ups. Then, at night, many executives enjoy happy hours and boozy dinners,2 perhaps with former colleagues or maybe with leaders from their airline’s closest joint venture and codeshare partners.

Sadly, airlines never invite me to those bilateral meetings (I hear they can be quite boring), and a carrier only once invited me to a boozy dinner, though just for dessert. But I do participate in what many consider to be the best part of the AGM: the gossip, when executives freely share industry chatter as if they’re characters from “Mean Girls.” The fodder is what you would expect: job openings, people they don’t like, and competitor executives they view as incompetent.3

I’m not going to betray what I learned in off-the-record discussions, but there is a topic that executives will discuss with me “on background” (that’s what you say to me when you’re telling me something I can use so long as it can’t be traced to you). They love to chat about big open jobs — specifically, who is going to get them.4

This year, the favorite topic was: who will replace Robert Isom and when?5 I’ll cover that soon, but since we think Isom has time, I’ll focus on a more urgent personnel matter: who will lead Air Canada no later than Sept. 30 after Mike Rousseau, who does not speak French, retires. Here’s what I heard in Rio about Rousseau’s likely successors.

The top three

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By now you should know the top headlines from last week’s Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference. I won’t repeat them. You should come to The Airline Observer for the insider-y stuff that others don’t cover.

What they didn’t cover is how Robert Isom once again proved he is both bland and seemingly incapable of selling a compelling narrative about American’s future to investors.

I almost feel bad for the guy. As usual, Scott Kirby — Isom’s former boss and current public antagonizer — soaked up most of the attention at Bernstein with inflammatory comments on JetBlue’s losses. (Kirby was clear he’s not interested in a pre-bankruptcy JetBlue, though he’d gobble up American, should the opportunity arise.)

Kirby likely delights in making Isom look like an amateur. But other CEOs know how to play this rhetorical game too. Even Bob Jordan, whom I once considered the most vanilla man in aviation,1 has learned how to tease investors with enough nuggets to win extra press coverage. (This time, he said Southwest might add first class seats, as well as long-haul flights to as many as a dozen destinations.)

So while Kirby and Jordan played offense at last week’s conference, Isom mostly played defense, just like usual. And not a particularly effective version of it.

Perhaps I should let it go, and admit that’s who Isom is. A former operations chief, Isom is cautious, long preferring controlling costs over investing in cabin interiors, branding, and lucrative (but risky) long-haul flights. Still, I’ll note that, perhaps because I think he wants to retain his job, Isom recently embraced the promise of premium revenues and international flying. There have been improvements; now he must do a better job of communicating it.

Today, I will share with you four things Isom told investors in hopes of changing how investors think of the airline (and his leadership). I respect that Isom no longer views an airline seat as a commodity product, but I still don’t think he fully gets what it will take to turn American around.

Let’s get into it.

Isom used a hockey metaphor. It was incorrect.

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“We’re putting in an overlay that’s not letting the system overreact to a drop in bookings,” chief commercial officer Sophie Dekkers told analysts last week on EasyJet’s FY2026 first half results earnings call.

Even as more airlines trust A.I. and machine learning to give them concrete answers, how to price in an uncertain environment remains a dilemma. With August bookings down 7 percent compared to expectations, EasyJet had two choices – lower its prices (as the machine would suggest), or pray for better times while managing for yield.

EasyJet opted for the second option, because its executives bet they know information about consumer behavior that the revenue management system does not. CEO Kenton Jarvis told analysts that demand is robust, just delayed compared to historical norms, because customers have been spooked by “unhelpful comments” from European politicians who fear potential fuel shortages.

Airlines now know fuel won’t be a problem, but it’s not clear that all travelers have received the message. Some have been taking a wait-and-see attitude for late-summer trips.

”People are just leaving that decision to later,” Jarvis said. ‘We don’t yet know what the fare environment will be for July, August, and September."

‘A game of chicken’

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It should not surprise you which style I prefer. While I h…

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Wizz Air Chief Commercial Officer Ian Malin also said he has no qualms, telling me his airline has secured its fuel for May and June, and is expecting its suppliers soon will secure stock for July.

”I struggle to accept that we will systematically run out of fuel,” Malin said. “Four weeks ago people were saying we had four weeks’ worth of fuel. Today there are no issues anywhere in our network. Now the press is saying it’s six to eight weeks. We have daily calls with all our airports and fuel suppliers. Nobody is saying they will run out.”2

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But under his successor, Jimmy Dempsey (a long-time financial executive), Frontier is taking a more measured approach, in both expansion and rhetoric. During Frontier’s first quarter earnings call on Tuesday, Dempsey made it clear that he does not seek world domination. Instead, he wants to return the airline to consistent profitability.

So while Frontier will evaluate opportunities to add flights, and consider bidding for assets at key airports, Dempsey said he won’t make irrational decisions to win share.

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Scott Kirby likes to remind us about his math acumen, so I figured he might share a sophisticated analysis of fare patterns. Or, perhaps he might he explain how raising fares in lockstep is illegal (remember the “capacity discipline” era?) and challenging to coordinate because some carriers grow for their own reasons.

But he did neither. Instead, he blamed other CEOs, saying some lack the knowledge and backbone to raise fares, except when faced with external stressors. Kirby said too many CEOs take advice from marketing and government relations executives and argued those people worry too much about whether the public will view their airlines as price gougers. In Kirby’s telling, that’s a big reason airfares have fallen in real terms since the pandemic.

”I’ve watched this for at least 25 years now and have come to the conclusion that ... every airline CEO should have to have spent two years at a reasonably senior position in revenue management [and] understand it,” Kirby said. “Most of them haven’t. That’s the reason it’s harder to get fares up.”2

I understand his argument. The math nerds who populate revenue management departments might be the smartest people at an airline, but many of them — how can I say this nicely? — struggle to communicate effectively. When they approach a CEO with ideas based on advanced math, Kirby said, they’re drowned out by louder voices who warn of public backlash. Some voices might remind CEOs that grandstanding lawmakers like to summon airline executives for questioning. Who wants that?

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Some subscribers have emailed and texted to say Scott Kirby’s very detailed statement about American rebuffing his desire to acquire the airline is an indication that Kirby wishes to move on. “They declined to engage and instead responded by publicly closing the door,” Kirby said in a statement filed Monday with the SEC. “And without a willing partner, something this big simply can’t get done.”

If you think he’s done, you don’t know Kirby.

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The numbers were not pretty. The parent company of Alaska, Hawaiian, and regional airline Horizon reported a net margin of -9.6 percent on revenue of $3.3 billion. The group spent an extra $100 million for fuel than it had budgeted, paying an average cost of $2.98 per gallon, about 14 percent higher year-over-year.

Overall demand was robust, but the group faced some revenue challenges as it limped to a loss equal to $1.69 per share. During what CEO Ben Minicucci called “once in a generation rainstorms” in Hawaii, with rainfall during two weeks in March reaching 3,000 percent of normal levels in some regions, passengers called off many trips, driving “a spike in cancellations and near-term book away,” chief commercial officer Andrew Harrison said on Tuesday’s first quarter earnings call.

Customers might have shifted to Mexico, but Puerto Vallarta (where Alaska is the top U.S carrier) had its own problems. “Civil unrest leading up to the spring break travel period had a meaningful impact on demand as well,” Harrison said.

Alaska and Hawaiian remain leisure-oriented airlines, and these two regions account for roughy 30 percent of the group’s capacity — enough to cost the company nearly a point of RASM in the first quarter.

While the worst is over, Harrison warned of an overhang into April and May, a major headwind for a company that needs massive revenue to counter rising costs. It predicts its second quarter fuel bill will be $600 million higher than it planned for, and it expects to pay an average of $4.50 per gallon.1 “As of today, we are recovering approximately one-third of incremental fuel costs,” Harrison said.

With fuel costs expensive (and fluctuating), the company has suspended EPS guidance, telling analysts there are too many potential outcomes to make a concrete prediction about prices. Nonetheless, whatever the price-per-gallon, executives said they’re optimistic they can pass on some expenses to customers.

“Some of these fare increases are sticking,” Minicucci said. “We’re getting an average of $25 [extra] on an average fare, give or take, depending on which market it is.”

To gain pricing power, the group is removing flights in Mexico and on late-night departures in high-frequency markets. Though North America capacity should fall slightly year-over-year in the second quarter, systemwide capacity is expected to rise 1 percent, because of new long-haul flights from Seattle.

How big of a problem is all of this?

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