By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Stocks of airline companies were among the gainers in Wednesday’s premarket trading as United's (NASDAQ:UAL) narrower quarterly loss on higher revenue boosted sentiment.
United Airlines, Delta (NYSE:DAL) and Southwest (NYSE:LUV) were all up 1.5%. JetBlue Airways (NASDAQ:JBLU) rose 1% as the airline’s numbers reflected traffic is slowly, but surely coming back.
A net loss of $434 million in the three-month period was the airline’s sixth consecutive but much less than $1.62 billion a year earlier, when the pandemic was raging and airlines across the world were grounded. The airline flew over eight times more passengers in the June quarter from a year ago.
Operating revenue jumped more than three-and-a-half times to $5.47 billion as economies reopened and passengers took to travelling again.
The airline expects to offer 39% more capacity in the current quarter but that would still be more than 25% below 2019 levels.
Based on current trends, the company expects total revenue per available seat mile (TRASM) - a key measure of capacity utilization - to be up versus the third quarter of 2019 in the current three months. That would be the first period of positive TRASM growth in over a year.