As American travelers feel the pinch of inflation and elevated airline costs, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian revealed exactly what it will take for ticket prices to decline, pointing directly to a lack of market supply rather than solely fluctuating fuel costs.
“People ask me all the time – what’s happening with prices?” Bastian told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo in an exclusive interview on Tuesday. “Prices will come down when we can fly more, when there’s more supply, it’s a supply and demand. Right now we’re kind of logjammed.”
“There’s not a lot of supply we can bring in because the air traffic control system is congested. As you open up the skies, and you bring more flow, that’s going to help bring pricing down and enable us to bring more people to more places,” he said.
After months of elevated prices due to conflict in Iran and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, commercial traffic is ramping up in the key waterway after Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian last Wednesday signed a 14-point memorandum aimed at ending the war.
On Tuesday, President Trump said that 19 million barrels of oil flowed out of the Strait of Hormuz the day prior.
“I think the initial shock, you know, prices went up about 10 to 15%, not just [at] Delta, across the airline industry. And I think that was probably the right level,” Bastian said. “Oil prices have come down now, so I think we’re in a pretty good spot.”
However, Bastian revealed that rising energy costs directly hit Delta’s bottom line by nearly $2 billion, forcing the airline’s hand in raising ticket prices.
“We had no choice,” he said, while also spotlighting how government spending accountability and deregulation could also bring ticket prices down.
“We have seen more progress being made to eliminate those bottlenecks and continue to allow aviation to flow smoothly in the last year and a half than we’ve had probably in the last number of decades. It’s that significant,” Bastian noted.
“I hope, as an American people, we continue to invest in that future. It’s probably the smartest investment that we can make, because what we’re doing is, we’re making the air flow more smoothly. We’re enabling people not just for safety – safety is always our top priority – but [allowing] for more flights,” which the CEO says ultimately mitigates customer costs.
Bastian also discussed how Delta has recaptured investment-grade ratings from all three major credit agencies, won back Berkshire Hathaway as a top shareholder and is expanding localized operations such as “Delta TechOps” into a multibillion-dollar third-party maintenance powerhouse.
“We’re going to get to a point here in the next couple of years where our balance sheet will be a fortress balance sheet, something that’s never really happened in our industry to that point,” he said. “This is the industry that the US holds as the gold standard… So whether it’s Boeing, whether it’s our airlines, our aviation space, our technical prowess and know-how, we’re the gold standard.”