Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question is from Bill Greene - Morgan Stanley.
Bill Greene - Morgan Stanley
More color around the RASM guidance. Even if we add back in $40 million to the first quarter of ?07, I guess for the challenges you had last year, we still come up with an acceleration in RASM growth in the first quarter versus fourth quarter. So I’m still trying to understand kind of why you think that’ll happen. Is it just all the timing of the holiday or is there something else that you see in your markets?
David Barger
Yes, good morning, Bill. There’s a lot of moving pieces from the standpoint of what’s happening with RASM, and when Q1 over Q1, just even independent of the storm. First of all, the holidays, the way that they played with even New Year’s onto a Tuesday, with our demographics, the Martin Luther King holiday in mid-January, as we then moved into Presidents’ Weekend, it spaced nicely with Easter, which is obviously earlier this year, but also again with demographics with Passover into April, very strong for our route network.
I think it’s also important to note that, we’re just doing a better job. I think just on blocking and tackling from the perspective of managing the troughs better. And I mean not just the super troughs that we’ve had in the past, but, two weeks here and there, or a day of week flying.
Things like seeing the benefit of the OTA’s, if you will, to help during these mini troughs. Entry into the GDS, the deployment of the 190 into markets that, clearly have a higher level of business line, and, wrapped in there as well is, there are customers who now know that JFK is starting to move back to a level of predictability.
And I think that we suffered with that over the course of the past year with JFK in the news, and what was happening with congestion, and not that the slots are in play right now just yet, but clearly, we’re not in that summer peak time of the year. So there’s a lot of different pieces that are playing, and, Ed, you want to involve or add from the standpoint of RASM?
Ed Barnes
Nothing just as well as maturing markets, adding 16 cities in 2006 and five cities in 2007, I think has really allowed a lot of our markets to mature.
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