Wheels Up at Jefferies Fintech Conference: Strategic Shifts and Delta Partnership

On Thursday, 04 September 2025, Wheels Up Experience Inc (NYSE:UP) discussed its strategic transformation at the Jefferies Fintech Conference. CEO George Maxon detailed the company’s focus on operational excellence, fleet modernization, and its pivotal partnership with Delta Airlines. While the company is stabilizing financially, it faces challenges in simplifying its membership model and integrating its services with Delta’s platform.

Key Takeaways

• Wheels Up is undergoing a strategic transformation focusing on operational excellence and fleet modernization.
• The partnership with Delta Airlines is central to growth, aiming to expand the private aviation market share.
• Financial stability efforts are ongoing, with targets for cost savings and improved contribution margins.
• The fleet is being simplified to improve efficiency, focusing on Phenom 300 and Challenger 300/350 aircraft.

Financial Results

• Revenue: Sequential revenue decline has stabilized after seven quarters, currently flat quarter-over-quarter.
• Utilization: Aircraft utilization has increased by approximately 30%.
• Fleet: Operating with 25% fewer aircraft compared to the previous year.
• Contribution Margins: Improved from low single digits to mid-high teens, reaching 19% in Q4.
• EBITDA: Reduced losses from $48-50 million per quarter to single digits in Q4.
• Cost Savings: Targeting $50 million in cost savings in the short to medium term.

Operational Updates

• Completion Rate: Achieving a 98-99% completion rate.
• On-Time Performance: High 80s to 90% on-time performance.
• Brand Days: Achieved 14 brand days in August, indicating zero cancellations.
• Fleet Modernization: Transitioning to a fleet of Phenom 300 and Challenger 300/350 aircraft.

Future Outlook

• Delta Partnership: Aiming to increase private aviation market share among Delta’s customers to align with Delta’s commercial market share.
• Fleet Transition: Focus on flawless execution of the fleet transition.
• Profitability: Striving for consistent profitability in the membership business.
• Global Expansion: Plans to leverage the Delta partnership to expand internationally with Delta’s JV partners.

Q&A Highlights

• Strategic Partnership with Delta: Delta owns just under 40% of Wheels Up, viewing it as a long-term strategic partnership.
• Corporate Memberships: Fastest-growing segment, growing 25% in Q2, now representing just under 40% of the customer base.
• Membership Model: Simplified to a $500 monthly fee with a non-expiring deposit for flight funds.
• Air Partner (Global Charter): The global charter business is equal in size to the membership business, with a 50/50 split in gross bookings.

For more detailed insights, refer to the full conference call transcript below.

Full transcript - Jefferies Fintech Conference:

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: Sheila Kailu with the Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines Equity Research team. Thanks so much for being here today. We have Wheels Up. This has been a long road in the making, but if you don’t know George Maxon yet, you should get to know him. He’s CEO of, Wheels Up, and, he got there through being on Delta’s board and a longtime banker at Goldman Sachs, and he’s transforming the way Wheels Up is going to fly us around.

So with that, George, if you don’t mind just to give us a little bit of background of what you’ve been doing over the last few years quietly behind the scenes.

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Sure. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Sheila. Well, we’re in the midst of a pretty significant transformation. Wheels Up started, about eleven or twelve years ago, really focused on a membership centric, turboprop centric King Air platform here in The US and, grew very quickly, heading into the pandemic and then through the pandemic into one of the largest providers and most recognized brands, one of the largest providers of private aviation in the industry.

Delta became involved, and I became involved as a board member with Wheels Up when Delta private jets sold, when Delta sold private Delta private jets to Wheels Up in early two thousand twenty as it turned out a month before the pandemic. On the back of that, obviously, there was an intention to cooperate, collaborate with with Wheels Up, on the Delta side. The pandemic obviously, changed all that. And for the ensuing couple of years, Delta was quite focused on its own, challenges, as were all the other large commercial airlines. And and and and Wheels Up grew very quickly through the pandemic as a bunch of people who had never flown private started flying private.

And on the back of that, ran into some operational and liquidity challenges, growth related challenges, and financial challenges as demand for private aviation kind of normalized back to a higher new normal post pandemic, but a new normal after that that pandemic bubble. Delta made a decision in, late two thousand twenty three to invest into Wheels Up and really to make Wheels Up as Delta had gone on its premium journey, an integrated extension of its premium strategy and really extending into private aviation. And I, came off the board of Delta Airlines to to run the company. If you think about private aviation or if you think about aviation, private and commercial aviation have really existed in two entirely separate ecosystems sort of since the beginning of time. And what we’re doing, which is I think very different, innovative, and will be transformational is integrating commercial and private aviation solutions into one seamless offering for our customers.

In doing so, we are gaining access to a very unique addressable market of Delta customers. So Delta’s 45,000 corporate customers serviced by close to a thousand salespeople. You know, the portion of the Delta 20,000,000 active SkyMiles members, so if that’s a half a percent or a percent of that, it’s still 50 or a 100,000 potential customers. Most folks who fly private also fly commercial. And so this idea of creating aviation solutions that span across and then a breadth of aviation solutions within private within our own company was really a key part of the strategic focus.

Very early on in the, post investment period when I came here, we really focused on a couple of things. One, you can’t be a successful private aviation company if you’re not operationally excellent. And so we moved the headquarters of the company from here in New York, the sales office, if you will, to the operations center in Atlanta that we had just built, really mirrored after the Delta op center. I was successful in getting the former head of the OCC at Delta to be my chief operating officer and to really start a journey of continuous operational improvement with a goal of being the best run private aviation company and leveraging the Delta playbook to do it. We started disclosing our operational statistics even though in private aviation, unlike commercial aviation, you don’t have to, encouraged our competitors to do the same.

Haven’t seen that happen yet. But, but really started to measure ourselves against operational excellence as the foundation of everything we were gonna do. We also realized that if we were gonna compete with the best in class private jet providers, we needed a new fleet. And so we announced in October 2023, ’24 that we were going to be replacing every jet in our fleet, four, jet fleet types with two jet fleet types, the Phenom 300 manufactured by Embraer and the Challenger three hundred three fifty manufactured by Bombardier. We were gonna, gain a tremendous amount of benefit from those being the best in class, aircraft in their respective classes, the most preferred, the mainstays of corporate aviation fleets, the mainstays of our primary competitors’ fleets, such that we could start to focus customers on the customer centricity and flexibility of our model as compared to the predominant timeshare fractional model that exists in the marketplace.

It’s pretty rigid. It’s kind of a hammer, everything’s a nail approach. We’re trying to take a aviation solutions toolkit approach. And we started that in October ’24 with the acquisition of a company called Grandview Aviation brought on onto the fleet 17 phenoms right away, and we’ve been building that fleet ever since as we walk down the legacy fleets. Yesterday was an important day and an important milestone in that regard and that we announced for the first time a programmatic membership we call the signature membership focused on that phenom and challenger offering nationwide access back, Sheila, to covering the whole country, not just the Eastern and Western portions of it.

And and, and we’re very excited about what we think that’s gonna do to demand for that new fleet and that transition over the coming months.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: Maybe if you could talk about q two, some sense of progress starting whether it’s sustainable growth and profitability. What are some of the KPIs you’re looking to to measure yourself against?

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So I’ll start with, I think, some key operational KPIs. So we look we look every every quarter, every and disclose every quarter and we look every day at our operational performance. We focus on completion rate where we run-in the sort of 98 to 99% rate range now. We have I’ll come back to that in a second.

We look at on time. We run-in the high eighties to 90%. We look at three hour delays. We’ve started to look actually borrowing a page out of the Delta playbook. We started to look at brand days, which are basically days with zero cancellations.

The operations never run better than it’s running now. We had 14 brand days in August. And so about half the time, we’re operating with no cancellations, which seemed like an impossibility two years ago. So that’s on the operations side. On the financial side, that obviously supports the ability to operate to financially improve.

We stabilized seven sequential quarters of revenue decline on the back of COVID. We’re now basically running quarter over quarter flat on revenues, and starting to see those, those arrows turn in the right direction. We have driven utilization of aircraft up about 30%. Basically, we’re running the same operation with 25% less aircraft than we were a year ago. We’ve seen contribution margins, flight margin, go from basically low single digits 0.12% to mid high mid teens.

We hit 19% in the fourth quarter. I think we were 12% or 13% in q two. So we’re in the kind of mid to high teens on contribution margin. And that is in the midst of this fleet transition. Look, this plan fleet transition has a lot of headwinds and complexity associated with it.

As my operations people love to remind me, on the way from four aircraft types to two, we have six. So it gets more complicated before it gets simpler. And so we’re managing through some of those near term transitory challenges and headwinds as well. But we’ve seen continuous quarter over quarter progress. Sheila, we were kind of losing $48,000,000 $50,000,000 of EBITDA quarter when we started.

We were in the single digits in q four. I think we were in the high twenties in in q two, but we’re seeing continued progress and we expect to continue to see that particularly as these fleets now, we get to the tipping point where the new fleets, which are economically profitable, are, becoming larger than the legacy fleets that we’re transitioning out of.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: Oh, can you just elaborate, George, on what brand days are? You said you’re looking at 14 brand days in August?

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Those are days with no cancellations. Okay. Got it. 100% completion rate.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: And just on the fleet modernization, you’ve talked about what drove that decision. But how do we think about the fleet simplification as benefiting your business? My head goes to MRO spend, but it must be just more than that.

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So look, the the fewer fleet types, and this is a little bit of the sort of JetBlue Southwest model. Right? The few the flu fewer fleet types, that’s a tongue twister, that you are operating, the more scale you have, the more network density you have, the larger pilot groups and maintenance groups you have, the better, you know, economic deals you can you can get on that maintenance, the more efficient you get, basically. And so you think about, simplification of fleet as driving a lot of operational efficiencies.

And then if you select the right fleet types, ones that have higher operational reliability, higher maintenance and dispatch availability, the operational KPI that really drives the most unit economics, there really are two. One is utilization. How many revenue hours per month am I putting on the aircraft? And the second is efficiency. How much of the plane is flying around empty?

So if you have highly reliable aircraft and the phenoms and challengers in our fleet are operating at meaningfully higher maintenance and dispatch availability than any other aircraft in our fleet, which drives higher utilization. And then if you have larger fleets, you have higher efficiency, shorter repos, quicker recoveries. You get this this this benefit where a little more yield, a little lower operating cost, higher availability driving higher utilization drives more revenue and less, empty legs, you get not really percentage changes in gross profit per tail, but you get kind of multiples of gross profit per tail versus the legacy.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: Got it. Maybe can you talk about the strategic partnership you have with Delta?

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So look, really unique, a one of a kind partnership, nothing like it exists in aviation or in private aviation. You know, the way I would most simply describe it is, we are going to market together, and this is an integrated part of Delta’s premium commercial offering. So when you think about, as I mentioned earlier, Delta’s 45,000 corporate customers, We are going to those customers together. When you think about the the members of Delta’s SkyMiles program, they’re, you know, regular frequent leisure flyers who can and do probably already fly private.

You know, we’re addressing that market together. This is viewed as complementary and in no way competing with Delta. Right? The way Ed describes it is this is an extension of Delta’s premium offering into a category they’re not in before. It’s gaining a greater share of wallet and brand value as Delta tries to continue to drive more premium into their brand identity.

And so we are working together. We have a couple of dozen Delta people working in the operation, in sales, in finance, in different parts of the company. And look, it’s very similar. I had a chance being on the Delta board to really understand what a a partnership means at Delta. And so it’s it’s it’s being managed the same way as Delta’s partnership with Air France KLM or Virgin or Aeromexico or Korean or LatAm.

How can we make the collective pie bigger together? How can we share resources and ideas and capabilities to make things better? And that’s what we’re doing.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: Can you talk about the go to market for the platform? How how does it work? Is it through, Delta One only? What cities are you operating in? How do you think about expanding that?

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So we have a corporate sales initiative where we have dedicated resources and and so our semi dedicated resources around the Delta sales system that we’re going to market with on the corporate side. We’re working very closely with with the loyalty team as well on co marketing to those. If you think about that 20,000,000, active SkyMiles member database, a a slice of that, a small slice of that is sort of our common customers. We’re thinking about going to that common customer.

You know, on the leisure side, we ran an interesting kind of program pilot this summer and that we identified five cities, frequent travel, high volume Delta cities in Europe, Athens, Rome, Barcelona, Nice, and Naples. When you went on to delta.com and bought a Delta one itinerary and you got that purchase confirmation, the confirmation said if Athens isn’t your final destination and you wanna fly private to that final destination, click here. Many, many tens of thousands of people flew in Delta one this summer to those five cities. Thousands of people clicked, asked questions. Really, you think about it, we’re reeducating or rewiring the way people think about travel.

No one’s ever thought about, well, wait. I could fly on Delta to there and then last mile to some place I can’t really easily get to, Montenegro, somewhere in Northern Africa, wherever, fly on on wheels up. It kind of opens up an infinite set of possibilities that people hadn’t really had in their frame of reference. And so we’re really reeducating the market. And look, the end state is all of this is gonna be integrated together digitally.

So it’s gonna take us some time to get there. But, ultimately, if you’re one of those customers that’s been identified corporate or leisure as a common customer and you type in a city pair, into delta.com or wheelsup.com, you’ll get choices. You know, you’ll get a commercial option with two or three stops and maybe a couple of different carriers. You’ll get a hybrid option, you know, private to the long haul, commercial to private. You’ll get options.

And, ultimately, we wanna give customers choice. I think, you know, this industry, I think, has been a bit guilty of companies selling what they wanted to sell, not necessarily what customers wanted to buy. And, you know, if you subscribe to the theory that a lot of people who can afford to private have never flown private and you ask yourself why, I think their answer lies somewhere in the fact that it’s been confusing. It’s been a bit hard to understand for people. Am I really a private aviation customer?

Is it all or nothing? Can I try this? What are the barriers to entry? Am I working with a trusted brand? You know, the dominant when you step back and and look at how the industry is constructed, the vast majority of air private jet aircraft are still wholly owned.

And this piece that, you know, we and VistaJet and NetJets and Flexjet compete in is is a fraction of the market. I think over time, there will be fewer wholly owned aircraft and more aircraft operated by operators. When you look within the piece that’s operated by operators, the dominant fractional model where, basically, it’s a time share. You buy a piece of an airplane, and then that is what you have. You have a set number of hours for a fixed numb for multiple years, same number of hours for every year on the same type of aircraft.

That’s not really how people select travel. You know, what we’re trying to do is offer this aviation toolkit of solutions. You know, maybe you’re flying Delta out and wheels up back. Maybe you’re flying a turboprop on a short distance flight tomorrow, but next week you’ve gotta go to California on a Challenger. Maybe you’re taking Delta to Africa, but then you want a way to get to your final destination that’s not a commercial aircraft, operator in Africa.

Maybe it’s Delta on the long haul and us on the short. So we’re trying to put all of those tools and really take the barriers to entry down. The signature membership that we announced yesterday, Sheila, which focuses exclusively on the new aircraft, you know, represents the programmatically the lowest entry point, the fewer set of rules, the most access to the most variety of aircraft types, the most customer friendly rule set, and the lowest price. So I’m not sure which box we’re not checking, but we’re very excited to be in the marketplace with that with that offering we announced yesterday.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: How do we think about those 20,000,000 SkyMiles members and what percentage would be Wheels Up eligible? Or would it be would it be open to all customers?

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: It would be open to all customers. But look, we have to acknowledge, obviously, from an economic point of view, private aviation is only really accessible to a small fraction. But, you know, what I keep coming back to is and we’ve done some work with Delta really looking at that database and understanding travel patterns and looking at personal card spend and other indicators of private aviation capability, how often you fly. A half a percent of 20,000,000 people is the market, that’s 50,000 people. Right?

If it’s one per if it’s if it’s a quarter percent, if it’s a half a percent, it’s it’s it’s a 100,000 people. Those folks are already flying private. Right? There are people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on Delta tickets. Maybe they’re flying 20 times a year, but there are three trips out of those 20 where it just makes so much more sense to fly private.

And so we’re trying to, again, put those options in front of customers and let them select based on their kind of time value parameters and what the particular sort of elements of that trip might be.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: And maybe if you could update us on Delta’s majority stake in Wheels Up, what percentage it is, and how they’re thinking about it going forward.

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So Delta owns is our largest shareholder. They own just under 40% of the company. I have four Delta board, Delta executives on on our board. And and and they view this, as I’ve said, as a as a long term strategic partnership.

I think it’s in a pool of kinda capital and investment that’s no different than their joint ventures around the world with their joint venture airline partners. There’s no timeline to it. It really wasn’t, you know, Delta investing a $150,000,000 into Wheels Up, along with a bank facility for another 100. You know, it wasn’t an investment they would have made if it didn’t have long term strategic relevance in their in their long term strategy, and we wouldn’t be putting ourselves together in front of their biggest and most important customers if this were sort of a short term investment horizon or or or an experiment.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: Can we talk about corporate memberships as your fastest growing channel? Why is it growing so quickly? How are you being engaging with that corporate members?

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So look, Wheels Up’s history started as basically a 100% leisure company. As you mentioned, Sheila, the corporate segment is our fastest growing segment. It grew 25% in the second quarter. Our corporate customers now represent just under 40%, kind of starting from a very low number a few years ago of our total customer base.

And as you mentioned, it’s the fastest growing segment. I think it’s the fastest growing segment for two or three reasons. One, obviously, we were underrepresented, so there’s a bigger opportunity. Two, we have a unique asset and advantage in going to market in partnership Delta. Right?

Delta is the biggest airline provider to many of these customers, and so we’re sort of going in the front door with a combined offering that our private aviation competitors really can’t can’t replicate. And and third, we now have an offering in the Challenger and Phenom platforms we’re transitioning into that. We didn’t select those aircraft sort of, you know, haphazardly. Those are the mainstay aircraft of many, many corporate travel, private aviation travelers, and those are many of the aircraft that they have in their own fleets. And so we’re there with the product they wanna buy, with a partner who is their biggest airline provider in in many cases, and in a market segment where we’ve been underrepresented.

So there’s kind of more opportunity for us.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: Maybe if we could talk about activities needed to drive annual cash savings in the next several quarters. Can you just update us on your progress with the balance sheet?

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. Sure. So we announced, I I said in our last quarterly update, in the second quarter that we were looking to drive $50,000,000 of cost savings, in the short to medium term here. We’re on track, to do that and frankly view that as a goal we’d like to exceed. And there’s lots of opportunities here.

I think as I mentioned on the operation, as we simplify the fleet and and and deliver a fleet that is more reliable and more efficient, we’re gonna drive operational efficiencies through that process. On the commercial side, we actually, and I should take a half a step back and explain it or describe this. There really are two parts to our business. You you asked earlier in the very beginning kind of, you know, what Wheels Up was and what it is. It started as I described it.

Today, we are not only the membership business that we’ve spent a lot of the time thus far talking about, but we have an equal sized global charter business. So three years ago, we acquired a company called AirPartner, which is a sixty five year old, London Stock Exchange traded global charter broker. We think the largest in the world, certainly one of the top two or three. So when you look at our business today, it’s half this on fleet membership US business, which we’re in the process of transforming as we’ve described, and it’s half a global charter business. And so, you know, the combination of of of those two businesses, the integration of those businesses into one seamless offering is still in process.

Today, we’re operating two sales forces, two sales service delivery functions. And so as we come to market as one, there are gonna be significant be opportunities there as well as just across the board. So we’re we’re looking at cost efficiencies across the board and and are very excited about the opportunity to just do what we’ve been doing more efficiently. And that $50,000,000 target is something we’re out there publicly with, and and and hope to do better.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: How do we think about where the model is more preferable, the asset light year partner versus the owned up fleet?

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: I I think look. There’s a lot of discussion and debate about this, and everybody has their own view. But I think that a mix is really where you optimally wanna be. I think there are markets in which capacity is tight, where you’re really happy to have your own aircraft. I think there are markets where, you know, conditions are more, more, less supply constrained, and and you’re happy to not have everything on fleet, and owned assets.

And so I think this optimal mix and look right now, it’s interesting. You know, we started this I was looking at these numbers just earlier. We when we started this journey, we were about two thirds, one third asset heavy or on fleet, off fleet. We’re now fifty fifty. So, literally, our charter business is the same size as our on a gross bookings basis as our, programmatic fleet.

And I think that’s a good place to be. The charter business is profitable and growing. The membership business, as I mentioned, is improving quickly. And on the back of this fleet modernization, it’s expected to continue to improve quickly. But I think that an optimal mix would be somewhere in the fifty fifty range for us.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: We talked about this back in April too, George, but just on the membership business, can you talk about how you’re simplifying the model and making it more user friendly?

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So, you know, the the membership model of of Wheels Up has evolved a lot. I think there was a a big focus initially on how can I attract the largest number of members as opposed to really thinking about quality of membership members or profitability of members? We shed a lot of unprofitable flying. We shed a number of membership categories that kind of evolved out of COVID that were folks that wanted to be part of the community, frankly, you know, buying $995 memberships.

They may or may not have ever flown. Maybe they flew once, but they weren’t really private aviation customers. And we’ve we’ve focused that down to, people who are regularly the membership is for people who are, you know, consistently flying, private. We’re happy to fly people once or twice a year too. They’re gonna be charter customers, typically not member customers.

And so we’ve really, Sheila, tried to take all the barriers out. So, basically, the way the membership works is it’s a it’s a monthly, you know, $500 a month membership fee. People in this room living in New York might have spent more going to dinner last night. And then it’s a not it’s a it’s a it’s a non expiring deposit. Basically, you deposit funds, and then you use those funds to fly your membership flights, your charter flights.

You can buy Delta tickets with it. And we really try to remove all these barriers, barriers around restriction to aircraft types, barriers around using your funds by a certain time or losing them, and really trying to focus on access and customer centricity in the model. And I think those are places where there’s lots of low hanging fruit to differentiate yourself in this industry relative to what else is out there.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: Maybe, one on reliability as being key in aviation. How do you think about reliability? You talked about more focusing on the brand days and just your operational KPIs.

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. As Wheels Up grew, it did through the pandemic, it did so by acquiring a number of small operators and then really had trouble integrating them. And when I got in here in October ’23, we had just consolidated multiple operating centers around the country into Atlanta. We still had either seven or eight, I think it was seven, different operating certificates, which is basically running seven different airlines inside the airline. And so we immediately got to work on consolidating that into a single operating certificate and really starting to measure and drive operational improvement.

I remember one of those early meetings in those early days saying, listen, I think we should disclose our operating performance because, we we should be transparent about it and we should own the numbers and we should go on a journey with our customers very openly on that. And, also, frankly, I thought we had already improved enough that perception of our op prior operational challenges was lagging reality. And so we made this decision to start disclosing completion rate, on time, And and and we’re also talking about brand days. And I remember having a disco well, what about if it’s not as good as everybody else? What about if, you know, it’s a disadvantage?

No one else has disclosed what they do. So I don’t know what everyone else is doing, but I know that it’s enabled us to go on this journey of being able to measure kinda day by day, week by week, month by month, quarter by quarter improvement, and being able to share it with customers. And frankly, it’s a very valuable asset as you talk to customers. Right? When you’re talking to a customer who says, gosh.

So frustrated. My last couple of flights have been delayed or canceled. You can say, okay. But here’s the aggregate data. Right?

Here’s how we’re doing for everyone. We’re sorry that your experience has been less than average the last couple of times, but it gives you an anchoring point where everybody doesn’t have their own version of truth. And it’s been really important. And and the operations team has really rallied around this idea of continuous improvement, and we’re excited about it. We we we love the fact that we’re, you know, an operation centric company.

And when you operate well, I think Delta’s proven this, when you operate well, customers start to prefer you. And so that’s kind of our strategy.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: As we think about the next twelve to twenty four months, just to wrap up, what are the key priorities for Wheels Up?

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Yeah. So the most important priority is to continue doing what we’ve already set out, to do over the last couple of years. We need to continue to drive operational performance. We need to execute flawlessly this fleet transition. We need to continue to improve and strengthen our charter business while turning our membership business to consistent profitability on the back of our new fleet.

We need to continue to strengthen and drive our opportunities in our commercial partnership with Delta. And I would say, listen, our partnership with Delta, we’re still in the really early innings. You know, as I was as I was sitting with the Delta team a few weeks ago and we were, you know, everyone was happy that we were beating plan and we were growing 25%, you know, my comment back was, okay. But what’s our what’s our market share of the private aviation market for all of Delta’s customers? And it’s single digits.

And no one at Delta’s happy about or or Wheels Up happy about single digits. If Delta’s 35% of the commercial aviation market, why should we be single digits in the private aviation market with the same customers? So we have a long runway to go. We haven’t integrated the tech yet. We haven’t really gotten to engaging with all of Delta’s JV partners around the world.

Right? For all the private aviation customers, corporate and leisure that Delta has, Air France, KLM, Virgin, Aeromexico, LAP, they all have private aviation customers also. So we look forward to taking what we’re doing here around the world over time and, see a lot of, a lot of long term catalyst for growth.

Sheila Kailu, Equity Research team, Jefferies Aerospace Defense and Airlines: Great. Thank you so much, George.

George Maxon, CEO, Wheels Up: Thanks, Sheila. Appreciate it. Thank you.

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