I know we’re well into Q2 earnings season, but I’m gonna go back a quarter one more time. I’ll admit it. I was kind of lazy. After the Department of Transportation (DOT) released Q1 2025 numbers, I created a post showing the airline changes in unit revenue and capacity in order to show how each airline was doing. As more than one of you pointed out to me, however, that doesn’t include ancillary revenues. So I’ve now gone back to do the slightly harder work to calculate total unit revenue (TRASM) numbers on my own. You may be surprised to see some differences.
As a reminder, here is how the chart looked based on stage length-adjusted unit revenue (SLA PRASM):
Q1 2025 Unit Revenue (PRASM) and Seat Capacity % Change by Airline
Data via Cirium, Unit Revenue adjusted to 1,000 miles
Avelo was by far the worst and winners were few and far between. But what happens when you take total operating revenue and divide it by available seat miles? You get that TRASM number which incorporates ancillaries and all the other stuff you can think of that would count as operating revenue. (And no, I did not stage-length-adjust this, so if an airline had huge changes in average stage year-over-year, then this is still not perfect.) This also gives us a look at the entire airline system instead of just domestic.
Here’s what the new TRASM chart looks like:
Q1 2025 TRASM and Seat Capacity % Change by Airline
Data via Cirium
Based on this, one thing is clear… Avelo is still by far the worst performer of the group. But move over Southwest, we have a new clubhouse leader in Alaska. Not only did it grow TRASM the most, but it also increased capacity a fair bit. I must give the caveat that this time I included Hawaiian, because I was worried about trusting Form 41 just for one entity in this comparison, so significant gains were made in that part of the network. But Alaska did well all around.
That being said, let’s not take away from Southwest. It still had a very good quarter compared to others.
This also changes the game for JetBlue and especially Breeze, both airlines that saw their PRASM decline year-over-year but now see their TRASM show improvements. Breeze in particular made a very large jump from where it was, and that’s thanks to increased ancillaries and anything else that falls into “transport related revenues.”
Looking at the big three, American actually improved a bit, but it was still barely negative. I’m assuming that’s thanks to a low floor for comparison purposes in the previous year. American did not have a good 2024. But Delta falls to the back of the pack as United surges ahead with increases in non-fare revenue. This can be misleading since if you’re Delta, you start a high point and have nowhere to go but down. (That’s entirely true, but you get the point.)
The ULCCs did not fare well in this comparison at all. Sun Country, Frontier, and Spirit all saw declines from their positions in the original chart. They join Allegiant which is still at the bottom next to Avelo, just not looking quite as dire.
Overall, this wasn’t a good quarter for most, but this gives a better sense of exactly what was going on during Q1.
This week’s episode of The Air Show goes live today, and Brian Sumers and I really dig into Delta’s announcement that it will be flying from LA to both Chicago and Hong Kong. Is this a commercial decision, as I start the discussion with? Well, Brian has other ideas. You’ll need to stay after the break to hear some of fiery discussion.
