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Delta pushes for more corporate contracting.

Article Excerpt
Delta COO Jim Whitehurst recently spoke with BTN editor-in-chief David Meyer about the state of the market, emerging from bankruptcy, SimpliFares, global distribution system deals and domestic airline consolidation. Whitehurst and CFO Edward Bastian both have been named as possible successors to CEO Gerald Grinstein, 74, who earlier this month said he intended to resign "a little while after" Delta emerges from Chapter 11 protection, as it plans to do next year.

BTN: Will the number of Delta's corporate negotiated discounts increase?

Jim Whitehurst: From Delta's perspective, as we are absolutely focused or refocused on the corporate market, we will be more aggressive in the marketplace. We went through a 20 percent reduction in our overhead, which translated into a 23 percent reduction in our non-frontline employees. The only area of the company that grew in size was the number of people in our salesforce.

We are investing literally hundreds of millions of dollars to put in what we believe is the best product in the sky and a ton of money in our expansion domestically and internationally to points our business travelers want to fly. We are spending a lot of our time and energy refocusing our times of day for when business travelers want to fly and we absolutely, positively need to be in the market selling that. We will be more aggressive as we move forward in the corporate arena than we've been in the past.

BTN: Would you describe the negotiating climate for U.S. point of sale as a seller's market?

Whitehurst: I wouldn't say that. As we have gotten into the fall, a lot of carriers have talked about demand weakness. It certainly is not quite as...