Wheels Up Experience (NYSE: UP) Reported 4Q Results, Remains Focused on Growth

(Atlanta, Georgia) Private jet charter company Wheels Up (NYSE: UP) reported fourth quarter financial results today; the report can be found here.

Photo courtesy of Wheels Up on Instagram, @wheelsup.

4Q23 marked the first full quarter since Delta Airlines, Certares Management, Knighthood Capital Management and Cox Enterprises closed on a strategic ~ $500 million investment in Wheels Up (on September 20, 2023) in exchange for a 95% ownership stake, thereby helping the company to avoid bankruptcy.

Highlights from today’s report, per the press release issued by Wheels Up today, are as follows:

• “Total Revenue decreased $162 million year-over-year to $246 million, partially due to the divestiture of the Aircraft Management business
• Adjusted Contribution decreased $16 million year-over-year to $3 million
• Net loss decreased year-over-year to $81 million, due primarily to the absence of a goodwill impairment charge in the current quarter
• Adjusted EBITDA improved $6 million year-over-year to a loss of $38 million”

As of 4Q2023, Wheels Up’s active members stood at 9,947, from 12,661 in 4Q22.

"In our first full quarter since the strategic investment, we have made strong progress on a number of key fronts,” said Wheels Up Chief Executive Officer George Mattson. “Operationally, we continue to drive performance and strengthen our team. Commercially, we are rebuilding our sales pipeline, restoring customer confidence, and are seeing strong momentum in our joint efforts with the Delta sales teams.”

This quarter, Wheels Up introduced a new reported metric, Flight Transaction Value (FTV). Flight Transaction Value is comprised of Flight Revenue, Charter FTV and Other Charter FTV, according to today’s press release.

“To better illustrate the scale, diversity and mix of our business, we’re introducing a new metric which we believe fully captures the commercial activity and absolute customer spend on our charter business within Wheels Up, which we call Flight Transaction Value or FTV,” Mattson said on the earnings call, according to Investing.com. “That represents the total amount our customers spend with us on all flight services. Our asset-light charter business, powered by Air Partners leading global platform, is an increasingly significant and critical piece of our flight solutions that has greatly enhanced our ability to serve the full breadth of our customers’ needs, here in the US and around the world, and is a great complement to our programmatic member offerings. We delivered $1.2 billion of FTV in 2023. That is up significantly from the year before we bought Air Partner.”

Wheels Up acquired aviation services group Air Partner in April of 2022. Per today’s press release, FTV stood at ~ $1.3 billion in 2022 and ~ $874 million in 2021.

Wheels Up defines Charter FTV as the sum of total gross spend by members and customers on all private, on-demand charter flights that are at at market-based rates, rather than Programmatic Flights; the FTV value excludes customer gross spend attributable to all group charter flights with 15 or more passengers and cargo flight services. Charter FTV is used in order to measure the size of Wheels Up’s private charter business relative to the overall industry, according to today’s press release.

Other Charter FTV is defined as the sum of total gross spend by customers on all group charter flights with 15 or more passengers and cargo flight services, and is used to measure the size of Wheels Up’s group charter and cargo charter businesses relative to the overall industry, per today’s release.

UP shares fell 12.36% in trading today, closing at $2.41, and have traded in a range between $1.15 and $6.08 over the last six months (remaining relatively flat over a six-month time frame).

** Not investment advice; The FLY Report is not a registered investment advisor.