US Airways May Revenue Looks a Lot Like Continental's

You may have been hoping that Continental’s weak May unit revenue performance was a fluke not to be repeated by other carriers. Sadly, and unsurprisingly, that’s not the case. US Airways released guidance today and the news was about the same.

US Airways is expecting unit revenues to be down 18 to 20 percent year-over-year. Like Continental, these are passenger revenues only, so it doesn’t include much of the ancillary revenue benefit. US Airways, unlike Continental, actually gives us a combined unit revenue prediction as well to account for that. From that perspective, unit revenues will be down 14 to 16 percent year-over-year. Still not exactly a stellar result.

Like Continental, US Airways has a fair presence in Mexico, but I was surprised to see that they expect a $20 million hit from the swine flu outbreak. That seems like a fairly substantial impact.

Once again, load factor was basically flat (down 0.1 points), so capacity cuts have helped. But considering that capacity has dropped more than 6 percent, the revenue drop is still hard to swallow. Things aren’t getting better just yet.