United Airlines Holdings, Inc.

My name is Brandon, and I'll be your conference facilitator today. Following the initial remarks from management, we will open the lines for questions. At that time, if you have a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phones. This call is being recorded and is copyrighted. Please note that no portion of the call may be recorded, transcribed, or rebroadcast without the company's permission. Your participation implies your consent to our recording of this call. If you do not agree with these terms, simply drop off the line. I will now turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, Cristina Munoz, Director of Investor Relations. Cristina, you may begin.

Thanks, Brandon. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to United's third quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release, which is available on our website at ir.united.com. Information yesterday's release and the remarks made during this conference call may contain forward-looking statements, which represent the company's current expectations or beliefs concerning future events and financial performance. All forward-looking statements are based upon information currently available to the company. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Please refer to our earnings release, Form 10-K and 10-Q, and other reports filed with the SEC by United Airlines Holdings and United Airlines for a more thorough description of these factors. Also, during the course of our call, we will discuss several non-GAAP financial measures. For reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to the tables at the end of our earnings release. Joining us on the call today to discuss the results and outlook are Chief Executive Officer Scott Kirby, President Brett Hart, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Andrew Nacella, and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Jerry Leitman. In addition, we have other members of the executive team on the line available to assist with Q&A. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Scott Kirby.

Thank you, Christina. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today. I want to start by saying how proud I am of the entire United team. COVID continues to challenge our industry and United with a truly unprecedented crisis, but we've responded better than any airline in the world and in ways I couldn't have even imagined. Our team has been focused on the health and safety of both our employees and our customers, remaining flexible with changes to our network and continuing to provide caring service to our customers, which resulted in the highest net promoter scores in our history. We've had to be innovative, creative, and very flexible, and our team has truly delivered. I want to sincerely thank all of our employees who made the difficult decision to leave United through one of our voluntary separation programs and those who have reduced their hours to align our staffing with demand. In spite of this, on October 1st, I had my toughest day as a CEO because despite all the incredible work and contributions of our employees, we still needed to furlough more than 13,000 team members. Along with the entire United leadership team, I remain focused as our number one goal, to make sure United is the strongest, most innovative, customer-focused airline as we come out of this crisis, because that's the way to ensure we can welcome all of our team members back. I also want to recognize and thank our union partners, many of whom stepped up to work on creative deals to get us through the crisis, to reduce the number of impacted employees where we could, and importantly, set the airline up for a strong rebound. I'm proud of the partnerships we have with our unions and believe this is a real differentiator for United as we look to the future. Since the beginning of the crisis, the hallmarks of United Response has been to maintain an objective and realistic assessment of the virus' impact on our industry and to plan accordingly. In other words, at United Airlines, hope has never been our strategy. Instead, the best collection of airline professionals in the business have confronted the crisis head-on, and that approach has enabled us to take industry-leading actions, including leading on safety, closely aligning capacity to demand, cutting costs, and reducing cash burn, using innovative approaches to raise over $22 billion in capital, pushing ahead with opportunistic commercial initiatives such as the cargo operations, new route announcements, and being the first airline to eliminate change fees on domestic tickets, adding industry-first digital capabilities like Search by Map and Travel Destination Guide, and entering into an industry-leading deal with our pilots. Back in March, we were focused on the three pillars that were critical to our ability to survive the crisis. One, raise and maintain liquidity. Two, reduce cash burn. And three, variabilize our cost structure. On the first point, I believe United has been more creative than any airline in the world in raising over $22 billion. On the second point, despite our larger business travel, coastal gateways, and international exposure, on any apples-to-apples cash burn basis, We believe United has had the lowest cash burn throughout the crisis so far among network carriers, and we expect that we'll be the first network airline to return to positive cash flow when the demand environment recovers. And finally, we've made huge strides in variabilizing our cost structure by reaching a landmark deal with our pilot and a variety of voluntary programs with our union partners, all of which positions United to bounce back strongly and on short notice. Having executed on our initial three pillars, Our focus can and has now shifted squarely to what the recovery will look like. As difficult as this crisis has been, at United, we've done what it takes to get through the initial phase that will get us to the other side. As Churchill once said, this is the end of the beginning. We were hoping we'd be wrong about the severity of the crisis, but our fact-based, objective approach equipped us to be more realistic and nimble in our response to the virus. We'll stay flexible, but increasingly, the light at the end of the tunnel is now visible. It's a long tunnel, and it will have twists and turns. It will begin to move back towards normal with what health experts are telling us is a widely available vaccine around the end of next year. Given all the team has accomplished in this crisis, we're now able to turn the page away from just surviving to squarely focus attention on preparing for the rebound. The culture that has served us well getting through the crisis and leading on financial innovation, customer enhancements, safety initiatives, commercial actions, and union partnerships is the same culture that we expect will lead to United being the global leader in aviation when this is over. The next 12 to 15 months are still going to be difficult, and the recovery will not be a straight line. But we've done what we believe it takes to get through. We can see the recovery on the horizon, and our attention can now be firmly focused there. I want to thank all the people of United, those working full-time, those on voluntary programs, Our pilots who ratified a deal where they all agreed to work fewer hours to avoid furloughs and keep all pilots in their seats and positioned for a rebound. And those that were sadly involuntarily furloughed. To you, I say that all of us that are still here at United are focused on the recovery. And as the leader of this airline, I have no higher priority than bringing you back to work. And now I'd like to turn it over to Brett.