American private aviation company Wheels Up saw a substantial revenue increase in its Q4 earnings. With bookings ramping up for the summer — along with hopes of being on the tail-end of COVID-19 — the company is looking at a promising upcoming quarter as well. CEO Kenny Dichter joined Cheddar News to talk about the earnings reports as well as the company's new app development. "We’re following that Uber, Airbnb, Amazon playbook and are really going to disrupt this space through technology," he said.

Closing Bell

Private Aviation Firm Wheels Up CEO on Q4 Revenue, New App Features

Welcome back to closing bell on cheddar news. I'm Chloe Aiello here at headquarters in new york as covid era restrictions lift, It's likely that more americans will make travel plans and one private airline services aiming to meet that demand wheels up today, reporting fourth quarter earnings, showing a loss of 31 cents per share on revenue of $345 million. This comes as the private airline says, it is seeing a jump in pre pale paid sales indicating strong future demand. How can wheels up, continue to fill this demand amid ongoing airline industry headwinds, especially as fuel prices jump amid the Russia Ukraine crisis? Well, joining us to answer that question and more is Kenny. Dichter ceo of wheels up Kenny. Thank you so much for joining us today. You reported record revenue, but a loss of 31 cents per share. So what do you expect to report profitability? Well, we'll be profitable in the future. I think we're building a company here that's really member centric and we want to take great care of our members as we build the company. So we're in a position to be profitable in a very meaningful way for our shareholders out a couple of years here. But in the meanwhile, we posted $345 million dollars of revenue in the fourth quarter. That's a 64% year over year gain and really proud that we took in $540 million 20, So businesses up into the right And I want to talk about 20, What are you anticipating in terms of your guidance for that year? Well, we're not giving full guidance. We guided to the quarter, but we did give revenue guidance and we're out there uh, in, in a range, which is a year ahead of where we were, when we went back I. P. 1.35 to 1.42. That range I think is where we guided everybody full year. But on the buda side we're just going quarter by quarter now. You did mention strong customer demand and a jump in prepaid block sales. You know, do you anticipate this will help you overcome any Covid related headwinds? Well, I think Covid were on the back end of Covid with the mask mandates coming down and back to the office. We saw a very strong demand through Covid. I think the first three or four months, uh, nobody knew what was going on. Not a lot of visibility, but I think that we're seeing a post Covid world here and our business, our industry has never been busier. What are you anticipating for the summer months? I know that tends to be a popular time to travel. What does the band look like? Well, the early demand and what we're seeing from airlines and our partners have Delta. There's a lot of bookings going on for the summer. So we're very optimistic about what the summer will be. It wheels up, it's traditionally are our busiest time of the year. We handle domestic short haul and we're really excited about the summer. Now. The Russia Ukraine crisis has of course led to higher fuel prices across the board. So you know, how are you preventing passing those on to customers? What kind of impact is that having on your business overall? Well, we're, we're putting in a fuel surcharge, it's actually going to be effective April nine. It's going to be all of our members participating. And again, our industry successfully put in fuel surcharges like the transportation businesses around the world have the good news is whether you're watching cheddar or CNBC or Fox business, you're getting the flash oil prices in the spot market. Our customers, both individuals and business very sophisticated and understand the cost that we need to pass through and pass on. Now. You are introducing a handful of new features like a scheduling system and updates to your app. Tell us a little bit more about those and how they're going to improve and streamline your customer experience. Well, ultimately, we're trying to put a global marketplace together. We have a big acquisition in europe called their partner that spending that we think 34 weeks out closes. We got the shareholder vote yesterday, a London stock exchange company led by Mark Griffin a and a great team that were taken on there as our partners. So we're going to have a european flag flag planted. So we're excited about that and our marketplace, uh, which is led by our president, the Nike Hegde. We have really, really exciting things going on in the wheels up tech. I would say that we're following that Uber Airbnb amazon playbook and really going to disrupt this space through technology. So we're really excited about that. I know Alanssi, we picked up, we're excited 12 new tales there and our global scheduling is going to be the key to us getting utility and efficiency and again, in the long term, gonna deliver very attractive returns at global scale for our, our shareholders. You just touched on the Alicante air acquisition. What else do you have planned down the line in terms of acquisitions? Either domestically or internationally? Well, we're going to be really opportunistic, you know, with the, uh, with the cash and the strong position that we have from a cash perspective, we exited this year with more than $750 million dollars of cash on the floor. We have the ability to back level a couple of 100 million, if not several $100 million worth of our assets. We're going to be super opportunistic around the globe and look for people with shared values and, and, and like vision that we have, we want to do everything in a very member centric way. We want to do, everything to support our membership and we think that the wheels up brand, it's iconic and it's, it's global. Now, we can handle certain adjacency is like the boat, boat business and the yacht boats and yachts and villas and lots of different things, experiences. We ultimately want to sell this all through our app, we have over 50% of our members using our app today to book their wheels up flight action and it's just going to go more and more digital and we're going to get more and more efficient, ultimately creating the best member experience on the planet as it relates to private aviation, both individual and business boats and yachts and villas. I think we're certainly excited to watch what wheels up is up to and sort of follow along with that narrative Kenny, Thank you so much for joining us. That's Kenny, Dichter Ceo of wheels up.