Delta CEO Sends Clear Message to United Airlines

Delta Air Lines has long been the top airline in the country when it comes to premium offerings. In recent years, however, Delta's competitors have tried to close the gap a little bit and improve their own premium offerings. It sounds like Delta CEO Ed Bastian thinks that's a good idea.

Over the past several years, most of the major airlines throughout the country have made an obvious push toward offering premium options to customers, seemingly copying Delta's longtime approach. Bastian, however, does not judge those airlines. In fact, he praised them for the move.

Delta's Pursuit of Premium

Delta has been looking to create premium offerings for customers for well over a decade, which is long before most of its other competitors.

As Edward Russell of The Points Guy points out, Delta's push toward premium began in the years following its 2010 merger with Northwest Airlines and accelerated following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, premium is a key part of Delta's brand, and that doesn't seem like it's changing.

"We're going to have a great year being the top end of the premium stack in travel," Bastian said at a Morgan Stanley investor conference on Wednesday, via The Points Guy.

Other Airlines 'Copy' Delta

Given Delta's success in the premium market, other airlines have begun to try to duplicate Delta's approach to varying degrees. Even Southwest Airlines, which has long been more of a bare-bones budget option, recently introduced premium seats with extra legroom to sell to customers.

Needless to say, Bastian has taken notice of the imitation.

"Every airline in the United States has changed their strategy post-COVID," Bastian said. "You talk about some of these other airlines, whether it's Spirit going through a second bankruptcy and you got Frontier saying they're going to put more premium offerings out, Southwest changing their mind, American changing — everyone has changed their mind except Delta."

United Finds Success With Premium Options

While most of the major airlines in the United States have followed Delta's lead and embraced premium offerings, United Airlines has undeniably had the most success in this regard, establishing itself as Delta's primary competitor.

United Airlines has become so successful with this approach that CEO Scott Kirby went as far as to put United and Delta in their own category, "really winning" ahead of all of the other airlines in the country, who he said were "really losing."

Kirby discussed “the strength of the two brand loyal airlines really winning and everyone else losing. And if I dig deeper into it and I look at every airline that’s not named United or Delta, I can find at every single one of them, a double-digit percentage of their route network that loses money,” he said earlier this year.

“The only way for them to get margins that are anywhere close to their WAC is to stop flying places that lose money,” he continued, referring to weighted average cost by the acronym WAC. “And that is going to ultimately happen.”

Delta CEO Has a Message For United

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it sounds like Delta is flattered by United's imitation.

In his most recent comments, Bastian sent a message to United on the airline's apparent imitation of Delta as he made it clear that he fully understands why they would do that given Delta's success.

"United is doing their best to copy us, and I don't blame them," Bastian said via The Points Guy. "I would copy Delta, too, if I was them."

Clearly, the approach has worked for United, so it's safe to assume that it will continue in the future.