United Airlines Holdings, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to United Airlines Holdings Earnings Conference call for the first quarter 2021. 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 not turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, Michael Eskinen, Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Brandon. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to United's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release, which is available on our website at ir.united.com. Information in 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 our results in Outlook, our Chief Executive Officer, Scott Kirby. President Brett Hart, Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Officer John Reutemann, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Nacella, and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Jerry Latterman. 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 Scott.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our call today. My, what a difference a year makes. Last year at this time, demand was almost completely shut down, and we've been burning up to $100 million per day. Thanks to our people's hard work, dedication, and commitment to doing the right thing for our customers, we're in a dramatically different place now. We're proud of the fact that after being up over 30 points last year, our Q1 customer NPS scores were the highest quarterly ever in United's history, despite severe winter storms and higher load vectors, a testament to the enduring changes we've made to improve the customer experience. We were also pleased to confirm last week that our core cash flow for the month of March was positive, and we continue to expect positive core cash flow moving forward. This confirms the view that we first shared in October 2020 that we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. We're more confident than ever in the recovery and in the long-term earnings power of United Airlines. Even with business and long-haul international demand still off by 80-plus percent, we can now squarely focus on returning to positive adjusted EBITDA as our next milestone. In fact, we now see a clear path to reaching that milestone, even with business and long haul down as much as 70%. In addition, we expect to return to positive net income once business and long haul international recover to down 35%. And as we've maintained from the beginning of the crisis, we're increasingly confident that both business and long haul will eventually recover fully. When that recovery begins, no airline is better positioned to capitalize on it than United, which is why we're so confident about returning to profitability and ultimately exceeding 2019 adjusted EBITDA margins in 2023. We continued our return to new vision in the first quarter and are making progress towards those milestones. One, a key pillar of returning to new is changing how customers feel about United so that they choose to fly United. In the quarter, we continue to pivot our operational measurement and decision-making to center on our commitment to customers. John will talk about this in more detail. But at United, we're innovating in ways that not only make us more efficient and improve our cost structure, these changes also drive a better customer experience. We are also solidifying and expanding our leadership and sustainability. Last week, we announced the launch of EcoSky's Alliance, a collaboration with global corporations to build on United's already dominant position when it comes to the use of sustainable aviation fuel. And earlier this year, we announced an agreement with Archer Aviation that's part of our effort to invest in emerging technologies for a more sustainable future, and we're excited for more to come on this front. United is clearly the sustainability leader in global aviation, but I'm encouraged by conversations I've had with other CEOs around the world, including others in our industry. which reveal that more and more companies are looking to real solutions, like carbon sequestration, to decarbonize our industry and our global economy. Three, the future of United Airlines is also committed to being the acknowledged industry leader in diversity, equity, and inclusion. As Brett will detail further, earlier this month, we outlined our plan to train 5,000 pilots at our Aviate Academy by the end of the decade, with a goal that half of the students will be women and people of color. Four, Turning to restoring our balance sheet, last week we announced a new debt offering using our slots, gates, and routes as collateral, with proceeds to be used to exit the CARES loan, and we expect that this will be our last COVID crisis-related debt raise. As Jerry will also detail, in the first quarter, we made further progress on our commitment to $2 billion in structural cost reductions to offset inflationary pressures, with nearly 95% of the savings now identified. As we return to new, this is not the old United Airlines you remember. The new United and our culture have changed for the better for our customers, our employees, and our shareholders. As business and international long-haul demand recover, we expect to quickly ramp to positive adjusted EBITDA margins, followed by profitability, and then exceeding 2019 adjusted EBITDA margins by 2023. We remain confident in that trajectory, and if anything changes, Recent results put us ahead of pace for reaching those goals. And with that, I'll hand it over to Brett. Thanks, Scott.