U.S. airlines offered a reserved but generally upbeat outlook for the near future Wednesday, telling an investment conference that the future is looking pretty good.
That assumes that fuel prices won't climb too high and that airlines keep showing restraint about adding capacity, the executives said.
"We are cautiously optimistic about the outlook," US Airways Group Inc. president Scott Kirby said. "We think the revenue environment will continue to be strong."
He added: "There's certainly no evidence that things are sliding backwards at all."
However, one carrier, JetBlue Airways Corp., lowered its estimate for unit revenue in the fourth quarter. JetBlue still expects unit revenue to be up this quarter compared with a year earlier, just not as much as it expected.
"I wouldn't say it's any weakness," JetBlue chief financial officer Ed Barnes said at the Hudson Securities airline conference in New York City. "If anything, maybe we were a little more optimistic, and things didn't quite turn out as strong as we anticipated."
JetBlue said it expects its passenger revenue per available seat mile to climb.
JetBlue had advised investors in October that it expected passenger revenue per available seat mile to be up 12 percent to 15 percent in the three months ending Dec. 31.
The new guidance is that passenger unit revenue will be up 10 percent to 12 percent.
JetBlue also lowered its estimate for total revenue per available seat mile, from its earlier 10 percent to 13 percent range to a new estimate of 8 percent to 10 percent.
But other carriers said their outlook remains good. "We're not seeing any kind of weakness that perhaps Jet Blue was mentioning," Delta Air Lines Inc. CFO Hank Halter said.
American Airlines Inc. expects its passenger unit revenue to climb about 7 percent in the fourth quarter.
However, Bella Goren, CFO of American and parent AMR Corp., said the near-term outlook is favorable, with strong advance bookings through Dec. 31.
"While as a cyclical business we are of course subject to the ups and downs of the economies we serve, from a revenue perspective we feel good heading into 2011 about the revenue generating power of our global network," Goren said.
"The business travel market continues to gain strength. ... We are also encouraged by the fare environment with fewer sales and fare levels that are actually going up in some markets, particularly in the international arena," she said.
Kirby said that if there was a part of the market that has lagged in 2010, it has been among leisure travelers.
"The driver of the recovery in 2010 has been based on business travel," he said. "Leisure demand remains relatively less strong than business travel."
The evidence is in the statistics, he said: "High unemployment, consumers deleveraging their personal balance sheet, home prices declining, so people can't take out home loans and use those on vacations. All of those things are causing leisure demand to be relatively pressured."