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Delta Air Lines could see 2025 becoming the airline’s best financial year since its founding a century ago, fuelled by consumers’ appetite for travel and the growing number willing to shell out for premium seats, according to its chief executive Ed Bastian.
The carrier, which reported $5.2bn in adjusted pre-tax income last year, could see the figure rising above $6bn this year, said Bastian. “As we move into 2025, we expect strong demand for travel to continue,” he said.
The airline anticipates earning $7.35 or more per share, up from the $6.16 per share it earned last year.
While some US carriers struggled last year as an abundance of seats and flights in the domestic market dragged on fares, capacity moderated in the second half of the year. Last month, several airlines revised up their fourth-quarter guidance, including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, two of the four largest US airlines.
The new year looked “relatively positive” for the Big Four, said Fitch Ratings analyst Joseph Rohlena. “It feels like we’re in a normal-slash-healthy environment after a lot of pandemic noise,” he added.
Delta’s revenue totalled $57bn last year, building momentum as the year drew to a close, and revenue growth from seats at the front of the plane outpaced the main cabin said Delta president Glen Hauenstein,
Both corporate travel and flights across the Atlantic helped to fuel sales. Tickets sold to big corporate accounts increased 10 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2024 compared with the same period a year earlier, driven by companies in tech and financial services.
Transatlantic travel between October and December also grew 4 per cent compared with the fourth quarter of 2023, to $2bn. Raymond James analyst Savanthi Syth noted the strength of the US dollar was likely to continue to support demand for international travel outbound from the US in 2025, benefiting carriers with well-developed transatlantic routes such as United Airlines and Delta.
Delta earned $1.6bn in adjusted pre-tax income in the fourth quarter, a 47 per cent increase from a year earlier, making it the “most profitable December quarter in our history”, said chief financial officer Dan Janki.
The $6.16 per share the company earned in 2024 fell within Delta’s guidance for the year, even as it absorbed a 45 cents per share hit because of the CrowdStrike technical outage that disrupted the airline’s operations.
