Monday, January 13, 2025

Welcome back to earnings season, everyone! Delta Air Lines ($DAL) has filed its Q4 and full-year 2024 earnings release — and with that filing, we are off to the races again! 

We always love Delta earnings reports because they’re a great example of the non-GAAP disclosures that companies make, and which Calcbench tracks. In the airline world, two critical non-GAAP disclosures are total revenue per available seat mile (TRASM) and cost per available seat mile (CASM). Just about every major airline reports those two items in their earnings releases, including Delta. 


Calcbench indexes both disclosures, so you can track them through time using our See Tag History feature. We did precisely that, and the result is Figure 1, below. 



As you can see, TRASM has generally stayed above CASM for the last three years, except for a brief period at the start of 2022 (when inflation was all the rage). 


The airlines publish lots of other nuggets too, such as fuel expense ($2.41 billion for the fourth quarter at Delta), average fuel price per gallon ($2.36, which is less than what Calcbench pays at the pump), aircraft rent expense, landing fees, and other items. Delta also breaks out revenue for passenger services, cargo service, and the always popular “Other” line of revenue.


We’ll be publishing more earnings snippets in days and weeks to come; and don’t forget our world-renowned Calcbench Earnings Tracker, which compiles earnings performance every quarter compared to the year-earlier period. We don’t have enough 2024 filings yet to launch the tracker for Q4, but it will be up and running soon!
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