Southwest Airlines misses on Q4 earnings

Yahoo Finance’s Pras Subramanian joins the Live show to discuss fourth-quarter earnings for Southwest Airlines after the carrier said it took a $800 million hit from the holiday flight chaos.

Video transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

- Pras, what jumps out to you from the report?

PRAS SUBMARANIAN: Yeah, you know, Brad, we're seeing the financial damage really done here from that holiday fiasco, Southwest reporting a loss for the quarter, like you mentioned, taking an $800 million pretax hit from that fiasco. You said 16,700 flights canceled during that 10-day period.

And now the DOT is investigating Southwest over where they deceived customers over the amount of flights they could handle during that time, so not looking good there. But revenue point of view not all bad, though, reported a record revenue for the quarter, up nearly 8% compared to 2019 levels. So that's pretty good. But you know, again, the big question is, can they actually recover reputationally from what happened last quarter?