United Continental Holdings Inc. posted a first-quarter loss Thursday, the only one among the major U.S. carriers, while Southwest Airlines Co. joined peers with profits in the slowest travel period of the year.
United’s adjusted loss of $325 million, or 98 cents a share, was narrower than analysts’ estimates. While Southwest and Alaska Air Group Inc. beat profit projections, JetBlue Airways Corp. trailed estimates as fallout from Hurricane Sandy eroded revenue.
Thursday’s earnings reports capped results for the biggest U.S. airlines, with six of the seven making money in a quarter that’s often unprofitable as winter weather dampens travel.
Higher fares, trimming expenses and lower fuel prices helped. United, the world’s largest carrier, was hurt by a 1.3 percent rise in total operating costs.
“We are focused company wide on operating more efficiently,” United Chief Financial Officer John Rainey said in a statement.
Southwest, JetBlue and Alaska follow peers Delta Air Lines Inc., US Airways Group Inc. and American Airlines parent AMR Corp. in posting adjusted profits for the first quarter.
Higher fares helped Southwest Airlines make more money than Wall Street expected in the first quarter, but the company said Thursday that automatic federal spending cuts could hurt revenue in April.
The average passenger fare on Southwest is now more than $150 one-way, 4 percent higher than a year ago.
Southwest’s first-quarter net income fell 40 percent to $59 million, or 8 cents per share. That’s down from earnings of $98 million, or 13 cents per share, a year ago.
Without gains from fuel hedging contracts, Southwest would have earned 7 cents per share, topping analysts’ forecast of 2 cents per share.
Revenue totaled $4.08 billion, up 2 percent from a year ago. Analysts expected $4.07 billion, according to FactSet.
Southwest unveiled details of a new no-show policy.
The airline will start dinging some customers who fail to cancel their reservations and then don’t show up for the flight.
Beginning with reservations made on or after May 10, no-shows will lose the value of the unused part of their itinerary and the rest of the reservation will be canceled.
The change will cover people who buy cheaper, nonrefundable tickets that the airline calls Wanna Get Away and Ding fares.
Unlike most airlines, Southwest doesn’t charge a fee to change a ticket, and it lets customers apply the amount of unused tickets to new bookings.
But the airline believes that the policy results in seats going unsold when passengers fail to show up.
United shares fell 50 cents to close Thursday at $30.89 in New York, and JetBlue dropped 33 cents, or 4.6 percent to $6.85. Southwest shares ended the day flat at $13.42. Alaska shares fell 64 cents to $60.24.
The loss at United included costs of $11 million from grounding its six Boeing Co. 787 Dreamliners, which were taken out of service Jan. 16 following battery failures on two planes flown by Japanese airlines.
U.S. regulators approved upgrades on April 19 that would allow Dreamliner flights to resume.
United spent 7.6 percent more on aircraft maintenance and 12 percent more on wages as the Chicago based airline reached a higher-paying contract with the union for fleet and passenger service workers.
The airline also had to keep paying 787 pilots through the grounding.
Sales rose 1.4 percent to $8.7 billion.
Information for this article was contributed by Mary Schlangenstein and Mary Jane Credeur of Bloomberg News and David Koenig of The Associated Press.
Business, Pages 25 on 04/26/2013