UAL - United Airlines Holdings Inc. (UAL) Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference (Transcript)

2024-05-30 13:07:09 ET

United Airlines Holdings, Inc. (UAL)

Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference

May 29, 2024 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Kristina Munoz - Director, Investor Relations

Scott Kirby - Chief Executive Officer

Conference Call Participants

David Vernon - Bernstein

Presentation

David Vernon

All right. We are coming up to the top of the hour. So I want to welcome you all to Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference. We are delighted today to be joined by Scott Kirby, United Airlines and the Investor Relations team. We are going to get started here in just a minute. We're going to start off with some of the forward-looking disclaimers that we normally do. I'd remind you all that we will take some questions from the audience through the pigeonhole application. If you want to go ahead and put anything through there or promote or demote any of the questions that might be in there that's kind of our new index card methodology for collecting audience questions.

And with that, I will turn it over to you for the forward-looking.

Kristina Munoz

Thanks, Dave. Information in today's release and the remarks made during this conference may contain forward-looking statements, which represent the company's current expectations or beliefs concerning future events and financial performance. Often, forward-looking statements are based upon information currently available to the company and please refer to our SEC filings for any further details.

David Vernon

All right. Now that you have all been appropriately forewarned, we can kick it off. Scott, thank you so much for making time for us and supporting the conference. I'd like to welcome you back. And maybe you can kick us off with some earlier remarks about the state of United Airlines and maybe whether or not it's all over.

Scott Kirby

Well, thanks for having me. It's good to be back here again. I want to start by welcoming my son, Sean, who's joined me at another conference and just sitting up here with me. I'm sure there's a lot of smart people in the room, but I think Sean is probably the smartest in the room.

So it's also great to travel with your 10 year old son. Everyone should do it. And I'm not saying that just because it would be good for airline revenues. It really does make business travel a lot better. At United, look, we'll get to Q&A, but we feel really, really good about how things are setting up.

In the last four years, like I think back to what we thought was going to happen in March of 2020, it has played out both for United and for each and every one of our competitors, almost exactly like we thought. And it's an industry now that there are two airlines that are probably going to be close to 100% of the profitability in the U.S. airline industry this year, when all is said and done that are different in ways that are structural, permanent and irreversible and I'll look forward to talking about why all those things are true....

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