Swiss Shines But Lufthansa Lags

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0:40Jay Shabat: I'm your host Gordon Smith and I'm joined as usual by co-host Jay Shabbat. In this week's show, we're talking all things Lufthansa.

1:03Hi, Jay.

1:04Jay Shabat: How's it going?

1:05Gordon Smith: Hi, Gordon. How are you enjoying your summer?

1:07Jay Shabat: Doing very, very well. And I'm particularly happy because we always speak about the earnings calendar. And actually, here we are on a Tuesday of all days with a very relevant company reporting within a couple of hours of the show being recorded. It's a beautiful case. So it means that you've had a little bit of time to crunch the numbers, Jay. Not get into the full detail that we'll get into in the Airline Weekly issue. We're saving that for next week. And just a little bit of note keeping. This will be the last Airline Weekly issue before we go on our August break. So if you have got a subscription, we hope you do by now, there won't be an issue in the middle of August, but we will be back for August 31st.

1:43Jay Shabat: But with that aside, Jay, we are focusing this program on Lufthansa, Lufthansa Group, because it is an enormous conglomerate spanning cargo and MRO and various airlines of various different descriptions. For the purposes of this conversation, we're obviously focusing on the passenger airlines here, but we did get the group's numbers out just this morning as we're recording here on the 4th of August, Jay. And for anyone that hasn't seen them yet, what were the headline numbers? What was the mood music at Lufthansa in Frankfurt?

2:13Gordon Smith: So the headline number is the single number that I look at most is the operating margin. And the Tunzer Group reported a 3.4 % operating margin for the April to June quarter, second quarter. Is that good or is that bad? It's pretty bad. It's, you know, last year in the second quarter, they did 8%. So obviously fuel is a factor. Every, you know, so far of all the airlines that have reported in the world, and we're, this is Tuesday, we're talking Tuesday morning, there have only been two so far that have reported higher margins this year than last want to take any guesses southwest yeah okay i was going to give you the one the other one is finnair okay and they they had a lot of strikes last year so that's kind of explains that so yeah you can see southwest is is in very uh you know rare form they're unique in their ability to be able to do that.

3:12Gordon Smith: I think we talked about a little bit why last week. So Lufthansa, you know, nothing abnormal for them to see their margins slip year over year because of what's happened to fuel prices. So you want to hear my new name? I have a brand new name for the Lufthansa Group. You know what it is? Go ahead. I didn't know you were going to join the marketing team. Yeah. I'm using my marketing now. No marketing professional will approve of this. In my head, I've been calling them the 60-40 airline. And the reason, you know, what am I talking about? The reason is that if you look at their business, as you rightly said, Gordon, they're more of a conglomerate, a collection of airlines and even non-airlines.

3:54Gordon Smith: If you look at, if you kind of break those down, about 60 % of the company is not well. and 40 % of the company is healthy. So that 40 % is basically three components of the Lufthansa Group. Swiss continues to be healthy, 9 % operating margin. That was down from 13 % last year, but 9 % is still solid. And the other two components of the group that are still very healthy is the cargo unit and the maintenance unit. Now, if you combine those three, Swiss, maintenance, cargo, that's about 40 percent of the group's total revenues which goes to show you that you know these these are not small businesses maintenance of cargo are actually huge for them maintenance in particular is a giant just to you know i'll throw a number at you so the maintenance division love tons of tech ops uh 2.5 billion in revenue just last quarter swiss was 2.2 billion so you could see it's even bigger than swiss so that's the healthy part of the company then you have the core Lufthansa branded mainline classic, whatever you want to call it, you know, the thing with the Lufthansa crane on the tail that operates largely from Frankfurt and Munich, that represents about another 40 % of the total revenues.

5:17Gordon Smith: And that, I think I had that number right. That is still trouble. And we've talked about some reasons why they are experiencing a lot of labor unrest they are uh experienced in a lot of aircraft delays which are particularly particularly debilitating for them because the aircraft that they're expecting have these new premium seats on them that you know knowing what we know about the market cord and that's there's big bucks to be made from those seats so they're not not getting them uh and then And you want to even add another layer of headache associated with not getting planes on time is that now you're forced to use your older planes longer.

6:04Gordon Smith: They're less fuel efficient. That becomes a bigger problem when fuel is skyrocketing in price. So you can see they just still have a lot of these lingering labor and aircraft headaches. Otherwise, though, the group overall demand is exceptionally strong. And of course, the other, I mentioned Lufthansa Classic. Then you have the kind of smaller airline groups like Austrian, Brussels Airlines, Eurowings. Those are not really, you know, some of the Austrian made a little bit of a profit, 3%, but I wouldn't classify them as, you know, maybe at best mildly healthy, but they have work to do to get to where, you know, Lufthansa really needs them to be as far as justifying plow.

6:50Gordon Smith: more capital into them, expanding them. So that's my, you know, there's your Lufthansa, the 60-40 airline.

6:56Jay Shabat: The 60-40 airline. You sometimes hear it as an economics, Jay, and you're far more abreast with economics. You quite often hear these ratios batted around. I'm thinking off the top of my head, the McDonald's ratio. I'm not sure if this is still relevant, but they get 80 % of their profits from 20 % of their customer base. So interesting to see a 60-40 applied to the airline world there. I want to bring just a little bit of color and insight from Jens Ritter. He's the CEO of Lufthansa Airlines, not to be confused with Carsten Spohr, who is the CEO of the entire Lufthansa group, but nonetheless, still a very important individual.

7:28Jay Shabat: Think of him as the Sean Doyle at British Airways to the Lewis Gallego at IAG. And he took to LinkedIn this morning, Jen's return. He said Q2 was one of the financially worst quarters apart from the pandemic. And he goes into some detail to explain why. He does say a combination of the Iran conflict and then the labor strikes that Lufthansa had in April. He said that they had to cancel routes and flew 6.5 % less than the same quarter last year, which drive up unit costs. He says roughly half of the costs are fixed at Lufthansa and cannot be reduced when volume falls. And he said the April strikes in particular cost an additional 115 million euro in earnings in just a single month.

8:08Jay Shabat: And he says here, which I think is quite candid, but putting into context what they faced, quote both forces hit simultaneously and the combined weight on our result was severe so ritter does go into some of the more positive elements as you would expect a ceo delivering a mixed set of results would do he does say the turnaround program is real allegorous that's the premium product that you were suggesting at the very start of the program there jay is generating a quote tangible yield uplift and gives premium passengers a broader choice of product and he's also big on ancillaries. Ancillaries for anyone that's new to the show, that's basically add-ons.

8:48Jay Shabat: So getting an additional suitcase or upgrading to an additional cabin or fast boarding or whatever it may be. There's various others. But he says there's a clear ambition to double per passenger ancillary revenue by 2030. So some ambitious targets there. And if you already look at what Lufthansa wants you to pay for an allocated seat, especially on a sort of basic economy fare, I think there'll be some eyes watering at the prospect of doubling per passenger ancillary revenue by the end of the decade there, Jay, but a fairly candid assessment from Ritter. And it is important to say, Jay, we've discussed this before, both on the program, but also in the issue.

9:24Jay Shabat: There is this narrative of the Lufthansa problem that, yes, this is the namesake for the entire company, the Lufthansa group, but based on just today's numbers, were it not for Swiss, there would be no net profit at that network airline level, albeit with Austrian making a small profit, as you suggested.

9:48Gordon Smith: Right, yeah. And for those who haven't seen it, Gordon wrote something on this on our Skift website. It is on the Skift website, right?

9:57Jay Shabat: Live as of 17 minutes ago as we're recording here. So yeah, fresh off the press.

10:01Gordon Smith: Okay, yeah. Maybe a little less fresh if you're listening to this on a Thursday.

10:05Jay Shabat: But not stale.

10:07Gordon Smith: But not stale. Yeah, still very much relevant. So go check that out. That explains that in a little more detail. But yeah, you're absolutely right. So Lufthansa, you know, I think what they really, well, they know that they really need to fix that Lufthansa classic operation. You know, that's the core of the company. It's such a big, big chunk of the company. They're lucky that it's not, you know, as important to them as, you know, some other mainline carriers are to some other conglomerate airlines. I mean, just having that maintenance and cargo, those divisions are very useful at a time like this, you know, when your mainline carrier is struggling.

10:45Gordon Smith: But they have to get that under, you know, under control. Now, they're ultimately shooting for an 8 % to 10 % annual operating margin. and it starts to sound tough when you consider that last year they only did 5%. So, you know, at the top end of that range, they're trying to double what they, you know, what they did last year. The year before that, 2024, they only did 4%. So, you know, they do have their work cut out for them. The question is, you know, what is their path to getting there, to reaching that goal? There's a few key elements of their overarching corporate strategy. We mentioned a few of them already.

11:28Gordon Smith: You mentioned the ancillaries is one. They do have this approach of what you might think of as labor arbitrage or AOC arbitrage by AOC, the airline operating certificate. So they have all these. I mean, we talk about Swiss and we talk about Austrian. We talk about Eurowings. But then you can go even deeper and you know they have an airline unit called edel edelweiss which is part of swiss they have discover which i think falls under euro wings they have uh you know i i this is way too confusing for my brain but they have a city and a city line but they close the city is that the one

12:06Jay Shabat: i i i might have that wrong but they close the city line yeah we close the city line okay thanks

12:10Gordon Smith: yes so you can see they open all of these uh different airlines with unique certificates so that they can sort of play the, it's almost as if they're playing the labor unions off each other. That's a little bit of a crude way. They might not characterize it that way. But the idea is that, you know, hey, pilots, if you don't give us what you want, we'll just shift more capacity over to, you know, AOCX or AOCY. And they've been doing a lot of that. But of course, there's a cost to that. It's very controversial. And the pilots are upset about it. The flight attendants are upset about it. There are some other issues.

12:48Gordon Smith: I'm not privy to all the issues that the unions are struggling with the company over. I know pensions is a big one too. So it's not all over this labor arbitrage issue, but they are trying to do that. But another aspect of Lufthansa Group's strategy is very much consolidation, which is also true for their rivals, IAG and Air France KLM. They are going just like Air France KLM after Tap Air Portugal. And I did kind of smile when Air France KLM kind of thought, you know, maybe it was a little bit of a punch below the belt. but they kind of said publicly, hey, Tap Air Portugal, Portuguese government, you may want to choose us because those guys at Lufthansa, they have all sorts of labor unrest.

13:37Gordon Smith: You don't want to deal with that. I thought that was a sneaky little argument there, but they may be justified. So consolidation is definitely part of their strategy. They, of course, bought Ita Airways, which is former Alitalia, seems to be going pretty well. I think they've just hammered the cost down so much, restructured it to the point where absent what's going on in the fuel market, I wouldn't be surprised if it's at least making money during the spring and summer quarters. They don't disclose that yet. They're going to bring their ownership stake in EDA to 90 % next year. That's the plan.

14:14Gordon Smith: So at that point, maybe we'll get some more transparency as to how exactly it's performing. So I mentioned a few things. There are also obviously the fleet modernization. That's a huge part of their turnaround plan. They want to expand intercontinentally and, you know, maybe shrink or at least hold steady some of the shorter haul stuff. One thing that came up in the call, which I did manage to listen to, just caught the transcript right before we were with enough time before we were going live here. Someone asked about EasyJet's current situation where we've got two private equity companies trying to buy them.

14:52Gordon Smith: And they are very much interested in EasyJet's Berlin operations and their Geneva operations. If, that's a big if, they were to become available in some sort of divestiture or monetization by whoever winds up owning EasyJet in the future. So they're kind of keeping an eye on that. And of course, Geneva is in Switzerland where Swiss Airlines would love to get rid of EasyJet as a competitor at Geneva. That would be a very welcome development for them. So I think I've hit the main portions of their strategy. I guess the only other thing I would add is, as you'd expect, given the demand situation that we've talked about over and over and over again, the premium demand is so strong that that's obviously a very top priority.

15:45Gordon Smith: And as you said, they've got the new product that they're trying to roll out as fast as possible, subject to Boeing and Airbus deliveries. And from there, with all that wrapped up, they hope to get to that 8 % to 10 % operating margin target.

16:00Jay Shabat: Yeah, some sad news for fans of four-engine aircraft. The A340s, specifically the A340-600, at the end of this summer season, will be being wrapped up. And also, I think there's two 747-400s Lufthansa at the end of the next season. Also, I don't think they're quite being completely decommissioned yet, but they are going into storage. So certainly getting rid of some of those very expensive, fuel-thirsty aircraft, Jay. The Flying Museum. The Flying Museum. Yeah. Well, yeah, I was actually looking at ways to get from here in Lisbon to Newark for our Skift Global Forum, which is coming up just next month.

16:37Jay Shabat: Wow, it's next month now. That's wild. go to live.skiff.com for the full details there but you know i need to get from a to b and actually one of the ways to go was a little out of my way but through frankfurt and then on the 747 to newark and yeah it is getting to the point i think it's just air china korean air and lufthansa that operate the the 747 in commercial service and you know the mood music is sort of even with those dash eight intercontinentals the the relatively newer version that's not going to be around forever. So it did cross my mind. Do I want to go three hours out of my way to connect in Frankfurt just to be on the queen of the skies going into New York City?

17:16Jay Shabat: But I think I decided against it in the end, Jay. But there was an important note that I thought was interesting here to speak about TAP and ETA in the management presentation, which was shared today. And actually it's available on the investor relations section of the Lufthansa website. So if anyone's really keen beyond what Jay and I are discussing here today. All of that extra detail is available to view there. And it is describing TAP as an enabler for growth on the South Atlantic. South Atlantic clearly being Latin America in simple terms. And they share here the market share between Europe and South Atlantic in 2025.

17:54Jay Shabat: Any guesses who's number one there, Jay, from the Europe down to Latin America? It's got to be IAG, right? Absolutely. Yeah. IAG 20%. Air France KLM at 17%. LATAM, bearing in mind that they are pretty much just doing their own thing. I know they were in one world and they've got all that Delta investment, but they have no alliance there, but they have just sort of become their own sort of mega group in a way, almost big enough to carry themselves at 13%, 1-3%. TAP completely on its own, albeit as a Star Alliance member on 11%. Turkish slash Air Europa on 11%. And then here we are at the very end, highlighted on the management presentation, Lufthansa Group, including ITER Airways on just 9%.

18:38Jay Shabat: And when you consider, like we've said already, all the various airlines that Lufthansa Group plus ITER includes, it's notably light, I think. So if you were to highlight TAP's 11 % and Lufthansa Group's 9%, then it'll obviously get you to IEG levels, and that's notwithstanding any organic growth there. So interesting to see that those numbers were shared so publicly and maybe as a bit of a soft push reminding people that actually, you know, if Air France KLM were to pick up TAP, they were already on 17%. And do you really want to be adding your 11 % onto 17? Discuss. Not for me to make a decision on that, but just presenting the numbers as they appeared in the management presentation, Jay.

19:22Jay Shabat: Lots more that we're going to discuss in part two, so don't go anywhere. But before that, a quick reminder. to send any questions or comments that you might have for us to podcasts at skiff.com that's podcasts with an s at the end please don't forget to follow or subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening or watching and if you are enjoying the show please rate us five stars or leave us a positive review so we can continue to spread the word about the airline weekly lounge don't go anywhere we'll be right back hello and welcome back to the airline weekly lounge we're discussing the lufthansa group's results today at jay shabbit joining me as usual Part one, Jay, we sort of ran through why Swiss is a bit of a superstar and why Lufthansa is a bit of a laggard.

19:59Jay Shabat: What about the others in the group there? You've got Brussels Airlines. That seems to be doing not quite as well as it could be, but it has got some real strength going down into sub-Saharan Africa in particular. And you've obviously got a lot of traffic coming through Brussels, which is a political center. You've got Austrian as well, which is ticking along okay, I would say. but again not going gangbusters is there a feel that expansion is the right approach for lufthansa group you know are you really wanting to be adding on lisbon when you've already got rome coming on stream and up to 90 like we said early next year when they haven't really got the house in order elsewhere is there a little bit of mission creep here or is this a maybe a once in a generation opportunity to make a strategic move, snap up that portion of Iberia or the Iberian Peninsula, I should say, and just sort it out once we've got it.

20:57Gordon Smith: I think it's both. I think you framed it right. It's both a once in a generation opportunity to grab a big chunk of that South Atlantic to Europe market, which is doing really, really well right now. I mean, it's extremely strong, premium, non-premium, just a lot of airlines are making a lot of money in that market. But at the same time, it's also, as you kind of hinted, has the potential to be another Brussels Airlines, to be another Austrian, you know, tap, tap. That, you know, maybe they will struggle with the things that airlines, that kind of medium-sized airlines struggle with. cost creep and maybe labor tensions and, you know, TAPA is no stranger to that.

21:43Gordon Smith: So yeah, there is absolutely risk of having another airline that's kind of plods long and doesn't earn margins above, you know, its cost of capital for sure. How long does South America to Europe, how long does that market stay healthy? Does it, you know, go into a downturn? So there's always There's a lot of risks associated with that, but it would be sure nice to have in their network. I mean, if you look at Lufthansa globally, that is one place where they're pretty weak, certainly compared to IAG. I mean, you've just read the numbers. So yeah, they would definitely like to have it. That, by the way, was an important justification in their decision to buy Ida as well in Italy, that they were pretty well, because they're located in Southern Europe, geographically the Rome is a pretty decent hub for flowing traffic into into and out of South America to Europe of course it's not nearly as good as Lisbon I mean there's there's other than Madrid I mean Lisbon is the second best it's uh so you know all those things are true I mean it's

22:49Jay Shabat: there's risks but there are rewards absolutely to get to slightly speculative territory I think it's around 10 percent of a shareholding in Air Baltic that uh Lufthansa have and that to me doesn't immediately jump out as an airline that they will be swooping to increase that 10 % shareholding in well-documented reports around the long-term viability of AirBaltic. And actually, he saw AirBaltic CEO on LinkedIn just last week saying that there is a plan in place. We are working on this behind the scenes, but he was acknowledging that there was plenty of commentary, both within the Baltics and beyond about what the strategy is at that airline.

23:28Jay Shabat: And you do have to wonder, 10 % isn't nothing, but at the same time, it's maybe better just to let that one run rather than try and double down, especially with all the various complications that they've already got in their own roster, Jay.

23:43Gordon Smith: Yeah. Yeah. And just, I don't think I read the numbers, just in case anyone's wondering, Austrian in the second quarter, 3 % margin. They were 10 % last year 9.5 so it's pretty good so austrian one thing that's uh you know kind of blowing in their in a favorable direction for them is that a lot of their low-cost competitors are leaving vienna uh i think did wizard close the base there yeah i just moved along the border to bradislava this summer moving over to bradislava which you know it's it's so it's so close i was there just

24:16Jay Shabat: the start of the year it's it's basically as far away as some international airports are from the

24:20Gordon Smith: capital um okay it's yeah they'll still face the competition but i think in germany as well for luftanza i i should note that a lot of because because of high high taxes high cost german germany has lowered it a bit recently but but there's very they've really increased the aviation charges since covet and a lot of lccs have either left or just not grown there or you know reduced their footprint. So in a way, it's one of those, you know, blessing in disguise type deals for Lufthansa in Austria. And when you're, you know, when the costs there are so high, they probably wouldn't say it that way.

24:57Gordon Smith: They would say, no, I want lower costs, but it does have the effect of chasing away your low cost competitors. So, you know, Brussels, they had a negative 3 % in Q2. So you can see not a lot of happiness there. You would think that they would be benefiting a lot from what's going on with the Gulf hubs because Brussels is an important hub to Africa. So you think if someone was going from North America to somewhere in East Africa, instead of going over Dubai, they might consider going over Brussels. I don't know how much overlap there is, but you think they would be benefiting. Obviously not that much because they had a negative 3 % margin.

25:38Gordon Smith: And then Lufthansa discloses what they call their point-to-point network, which I believe is mostly Eurowings. they don't really break it out and euro wings had a negative four percent operating margin in q2 so you know blah again not a happy story there either no a bit of a mixed bag and euro wings uh touching

25:55Jay Shabat: parts of the middle east as well so um unclear uh just quantifying how much of an impact that had on its uh bottom line i do just want to briefly come back to air baltic because i do have the quote here from ono hilden he is the president and ceo of air baltic the successor to i think martin gauss That was Martin Gauss, who's now at Gulf Air. So, God, out of the frying pan, into the fire, taking over Gulf Air this year with all the problems going through Bahrain. Yeah, that's a tough one. Erno said, over the past few weeks, Air Baltic has received significant public attention. As Latvia's national airline, we understand the responsibility that comes with it.

26:31Jay Shabat: And then he goes on to say, day-to-day business continues, summer season, et cetera, et cetera. But together with our stakeholders, we are working through a structured process to strengthen our capital structure. and there's meetings that were actually planned for this week. And he says here, again, with a bit of candor, I know many people would like us to share more already. We will do so at the appropriate time. But for now, there are legal and market disclosure requirements that we must follow. Certain information cannot be communicated before the relevant processes have been completed. And he does conclude here, aviation's a long-term business and so is building a strong company.

27:04Jay Shabat: So we wish our Baltic well, but I'm sure there'll be some people vying for that rather attractive fleet of a 220s that they have um should things turn sour or slightly more sour um but yeah we will keep an eye on things there jay let's just wrap up the show with a bit of a recap on where the big three european carriers stand so in the same way that we do um the american carriers we've obviously got our friends klm iag and now lufthansa group give our listeners viewers readers however you're uh enjoying the podcast a little bit of a final summary on where things stand this q2 earning season amongst the big three european supergroups

27:43Gordon Smith: okay easy enough ieg number one at 14 percent air france klm at five percent and the tons of group as i mentioned earlier three percent 14 5 3 14 5 3 i know which side i'd like to be on um a gap a wider gap than between the u.s big three u.s big three i think as we mentioned uh It was Delta 9, United 5, American 3. So a little bit of a narrower band there.

28:13Jay Shabat: But sort of, I don't know what we would call it, an honorary mention maybe for Ben Smith and the team in Paris and Amsterdam because I was looking at their fuel bills and how they were able to recapture some of that increased cost. And you had Lufthansa and IAG both recapturing around 60 % of those higher costs. But Air France, KLM, they initially expected around 60 % to be recaptured. but they managed 85%. So well done to them. Something clearly gone very well. And especially when you've got fuel being the number one, if not a very, very large cost for any airline that is significant.

28:46Gordon Smith: Yeah, I know that that's a good point. I don't, that's not the topic of this podcast, but for those of you who read the current issue of Airline Weekly, is it the current issue? Yeah, I think it's the current issue. It was the last one. I think it's the current one, where we discussed the Air France KLM earnings. You'll know this already, but KLM actually had a surprisingly good quarter relative to the difficulties that they've been experiencing over the last couple of years. And we've talked about some of them, those difficulties in the past, but they really benefited a lot from what's going on in the Gulf.

29:24Gordon Smith: If you think about Amsterdam being this, you know, just hyper-connecting hub, so much of what KLM is moving are passengers and cargo going from point A to point C through Amsterdam. So they compete heavily with the Gulf Carrier. So they've picked up a lot of that traffic. And they actually outperformed Air France last quarter 4.6 % to 4.1%. So it's close. but that sort of um goes against the recent trend where air france was kind of outperforming so yeah keep keep that in mind about klm kind of on the upswing we'll see if it lasts though obviously gulf situation one thing let me go back to lufthansa for a second i'll be real quick here but they did mention something interesting in the call with with regard to the gulf ups so a lot of the gulf capacity has been restored uh what lufthansa said is a lot of the there a lot of business traffic is still not permitted to use the Gulf hubs because of corporate policies, corporations for, you know, there's all sorts of risk, you know, considerations.

30:36Gordon Smith: There's a lot of corporate policies out there that says, no, you cannot travel through the Gulf right now. So they said they're retaining, they're still getting a lot of that corporate traffic that might've otherwise connected through Dubai and Doha is now going through, you know, Frankfurt, for switzerland munich etc vienna uh however they said that with a lot of the gulf capacity still restored and the gulf carriers discounting a lot to wind back traffic the european carriers are starting to lose some of the more price sensitive traffic so you know if you're going from the u.s to whatever where somewhere in the middle east or africa or you're tempted to take the gulf route because the prices are heavily discounted.

31:22Jay Shabat: Yeah, absolutely. I've got a line here from Swiss's own report. It says that when some Middle East-based carriers temporarily reduced their capacities, many travelers found themselves seeking alternative routings. This in turn generated higher demand for Swiss's flights, especially to and from Asia, like you say, Jay here. But here's the important part. But with the Gulf carriers restoring their production, production, unusual term, to previous levels, this revenue boost gradually dissipated in the course of the second quarter. So still some corporate traffic maybe flowing around the Middle East, but clearly some of the more price sensitive traffic and the leisure traffic certainly coming back to the Gulf Hubs as normal.

32:00Gordon Smith: I pulled that same quote. I'm just looking at it right now in my Word document.

32:03Jay Shabat: There we go. Great minds. Great minds. Thank you for that, Jay. We mentioned IEG as part of our little roundup at the end there. And who is joining us in New York City on November 12th? But Luis Gallego himself, the CEO of IG, that's the Skift Aviation Forum. There's actually an evening event. That's going to be the opening reception on November 11th. That's going to be downtown. But the main event, the TWA Hotel, amazing venue on the JFK airport there, November 12th. The first round of speakers has just been announced. Luis Gallego, as I mentioned. David Nealman, always a fan favorite. Founder, Chairman, CEO of Breeze Airways.

32:40Jay Shabat: But, of course, goes back way, way, way back with Azul, JetBlue, and many others. and we're also going to be joined by John Ackerman, the CEO of Los Angeles World Airports. More speakers to be added. I actually know a couple of other names that aren't on the website yet and they're very exciting. So go to live.skiff.com for the full details and to secure the best price. And if you are an Airline Weekly subscriber, you should have a discount code as well to get an exclusive subscriber rate there. If you don't, contact my subscriber team and we will get that for you. Jay, looking forward to seeing you in November.

33:10Jay Shabat: We've also got the Skiff Global Forum as well just next month. So I hope I'll see you in person before that. Got it. We're banging out of time. But thanks to Jay for joining me this week. And thanks as always to our producers, John, Monica, Kelsey, and Will. And wherever you are in the world, thanks for listening. And we'll catch you next time. Bye for now. Whether you're listening to us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts, please remember to subscribe, rate us five stars, or leave us a positive review. This really helps us get the word out about the airline weekly launch, so we can continue to bring you this podcast every week, absolutely free of charge.

33:41Jay Shabat: And if you're watching us on YouTube, be sure to subscribe to the Skiff channel and hit the notification bell to find out whenever a new video drops.

34:11Jay Shabat: improve operations, and uncover preferences and motivations through their AI-powered solutions. With more than 1 ,700 clients in over 170 countries, ZS has built the expertise, fortitude, and vision to help you deliver impact right where it matters.