Continental Airlines Revenues are 15 Percent Worse Than Last Year

Last October, things were not good in the airline industry. Sure, oil had come down and the capacity cuts implemented in September were still firmly in place, but the economy had just fallen off a cliff and people were scared about how low it would go. You remember how bad that was, and now Continental (NYSE: CAL) has come to say it’s 15 percent worse right now than it was a year ago.

October traffic is out, and it looks a bit different from previous months. For Continental, available seat miles (number of seats available times number of miles flown) were down only 2.6 percent from last year. That’s a much smaller dip than we’ve seen in recent months. Load factor was up a full 3.5 points, so you would hope that revenues would be ok, right? Bzzt. Try again.

Continental is predicting that October unit revenues will be down 14 to 15 percent over last year. Last October, while the economy was melting, the airlines still hadn’t seen the big hit thanks to decreased capacity. Most of the anxiety was caused by looking forward. In fact, last October’s unit revenues were actually up 9.5 percent for Continental, so you can see that things hadn’t started to tank just yet.

So it’s not that bad, right? Well, look at it this way. Unit revenues are still below where they were in 2007 before all these ancillary fees crept into the marketplace. That just shows how weak things still are.