DALLAS — Southwest Airlines posted a first-quarter loss as a result of cancellations and less bookings at the beginning of the year, but the Dallas-based airline said they saw a profit in March, according to their earnings report released Thursday morning.
Southwest reported a net loss of $159 million in the first quarter of the year on revenues of $5.7 billion, the company said in a press release. CEO Bob Jordan said much of the losses were a result of the $325 million in revenue losses the company saw in the wake of its holiday travel chaos, which resulted in nearly 17,000 canceled flights during the last week of the year.
American Airlines, which is based in Fort Worth, also released first-quarter earnings on Thursday morning and posted a net income of $10 million, the company's first first-quarter profit in four years, according to an American press release. American was not as impacted by the holiday winter storms as Southwest.
American's first-quarter revenue was $12.2 billion, a 37% increase from the first quarter of 2022.
American CEO Robert Isom said the company "ran a great operation and delivered on our financial guidance for the quarter," resulting in the profit.
Jordan, the Southwest CEO, pointed to the fallout from Southwest's holiday chaos as a reason behind the first-quarter loss. But Jordan said the company bounced back in March.
"The majority of this impact was driven by a negative revenue impact of approximately $325 million, as a result of cancellations of holiday return travel and a deceleration in bookings for January and February 2023 travel," Jordan said. "Despite that, travel demand and revenue trends in March 2023 were strong and resulted in solid profitability for the month and record first quarter revenues."
A severe winter storm just before Christmas affected all airlines, but Southwest struggled far more than the others to recover. It wound up canceling nearly 17,000 flights in 10 days before resuming a normal schedule. Unions for pilots and flight attendants said technology used to reassign crews to planes bogged down, and workers spent hours on hold when they called headquarters for instructions.
Company officials have said the airline's winter weather response and de-icing equipment played a role as winter storms hit Denver and Chicago, both key cities in the Southwest network.
The frozen conditions in Denver and Chicago started the mess, Jordan said in March, “and it would have caused the issue no matter what the network structure was.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report