Frontier Enters its Post-Barry Biffle Era
The airline's former CEO had a lot of grand ideas. Many of them failed. Now it's back to basics for America's largest traditional ULCC.
Dear readers,
At the risk of oversimplifying, I shall summarize last week's Frontier earnings call this way: Frontier will reverse many of the strategies Barry Biffle implemented during the last two years of his reign, when the former CEO experimented with aggressive (but ultimately futile) ideas to reach the double-digit margins he had promised investors.
“When I accepted this role, the board gave me a clear mandate to enact change at our company,” Jimmy Dempsey (the airline’s former president) told analysts during his first earnings call as CEO.
Importantly, Dempsey promised to prioritize cost more than his predecessor. I found it odd that Biffle loved to argue that Frontier would win long term because the lowest cost always wins, and yet Frontier’s costs kept rising. Last year, CASM ex-fuel increased 10 percent to 7.41 cents. That might have been excusable had Frontier increased its unit revenue, but the opposite happened — RASM decreased by 1 percent compared to 2024.1
Now, while Dempsey will retain some of Biffle’s revenue-generating ideas (including adding new premium seats and focusing on loyalty), he’ll hack the airline’s costs more harshly than his predecessor. He told analysts he’ll achieve his goals through “network optimization, productivity enhancements, and other efficiencies.”
Perhaps most key: Dempsey, who worked at Ryanair before joining Frontier as CFO in 2014, wants to fly more hours daily.
Here are some of the more interesting things I learned from Frontier’s call.