Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jamie Baker - J.P. Morgan.
Jamie Baker - J.P. Morgan
I’m having a bit of difficulty reconciling Southwest’s September and October RASM out performance. I realize it may not be apples to apples with AirTran giving different capacity philosophies, but it looks like you may be starting to see them as significant pricing advantage, presumably given their no fee policy. Any thoughts on this, and whether you’re Baltimore RASM might reflect such a phenomenon, given that that’s where most of your head-to-head Southwest competition takes place.
Kevin Healy
Hi Jamie its Kevin. At this point there really isn’t anything you can point at that says, that we’re either being harmed by having to see or anyone else gaining an advantage. I think there is a significant change for Southwest, in terms of how they sort of approach pricing this year, plus the capacity decrease.
While their loads are way up, they are still at levels that are somewhat consistent with the rest of the industry, and we are setting record lows at same time. So, I haven’t seen anything and it’s something we continue to monitor. I don’t think there is much share shift occurring as a result of having or not having a bad day.
Jamie Baker - J.P. Morgan
Is that suggested that there is any opportunity for you on the pricing front to do something to narrow that RASM disparity between yourselves and Southwest?
Kevin Healy
Again, I think you’re seeing a big differential in capacity. We are seeing improvement on the yield front. As we move into the fourth quarter it’s obviously low; average shares are moving up and demand, particularly as you look in to November and December is very strong.
Operator
Your next question comes from Duane Pfennigwerth - Raymond James.
Duane Pfennigwerth - Raymond James
I’m wondering if you could give us any sort of range on 2010 capacity growth, and specifically given no deliveries, what’s the upper limit on capacity growth next year if thing turn out to be better than expected. And along those lines, do you have an opportunity to actually shrink your ex-fuel cost profile into 2010?
Kevin Healy
Let me address the capacity and I’ll let Arne address the cost. The expectation right now for 2010, it’s around 2% to 4% ASM increase. As we noted before, we got a couple of more aero planes. A lot of that is going to depend on what’s going on in the market place, fuel utilization and some other things that we can do. So we can move that number up and down a little bit.
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