Score One For the Journalists

American's Vasu Raja nearly made it through an earnings call without giving concrete details about the corporate travel recovery. Then he faced a tough question from a Bloomberg reporter.

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Dear readers,

I have made peace with the soft style in which many Wall Street analysts ask questions during earnings calls — except when they preface them by saying "great quarter, guys," which is a travesty.¹ Analysts have their models, and they need answers they can plug into them to determine how much the stock should be worth. But if you want a real answer, it's best to have a journalist ask.

Vasu Raja, American’s chief commercial officer, skated through an hour of relatively tepid analyst questions on American’s earnings call on Thursday, before he was pinned down by a reporter² on a topic many readers ask me about: how much revenue is American forgoing by turning away from the managed corporate travel business? This a segment that again is growing at a significant rate, according to executives at Delta, United, Alaska, and even Southwest.

"Some of your competitors have reported that they saw a managed corporate travel volume increase in the first quarter of like 14 percent or 15 percent," said Bloomberg’s Mary Schlangenstein, among the most shrewd reporters on the beat. "I wanted to see if you can talk about... a comparable number on that, and what it may or may not say about your push for the direct bookings."

Raja likes to spin, or simply answer a different question than the one he’s asked, and so I expected he might pivot or respond broadly. But he answered directly.³ Raja said American has not seen anything close to the roughly 14 percent year-over-year revenue gains Delta or United reported, or the 22 percent Alaska mentioned, or the 25 percent Southwest announced later on Thursday.⁴