United Airlines Reverses Stock Buybacks At Very High Cost

News notes from around the interweb:

  • After spending nearly $10 billion buying back its own stock over 5 years between 2014 and 2019, United Airlines is planning to offer 39.25 million new shares.

    Yesterday’s close was $27.88. They’re pricing at $26.50 per share. That would raise about $1 billion. Shares peaked while they were doing buybacks a year and a half ago at $96.70 Buy high, sell low!

  • Ugh, are we going to have to clean our luggage after trips now?

  • Frequent flyer survey data from 27,000 travelers on what they expect from travel.

  • Gogo furloughs 60% of workforce, applies for government bailout

  • The metaphysics of travel.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. The key remains washing hands and not touching your face. The shed viral particles present (shed particles are not proven to be necessarily infectious) will be gone after awhile.
    The rest is germaphobia territory.

  2. Glad to see the those left holding the bag are UA shareholders and not taxpayers . . . at least for this $1 Billion slug of cash.

  3. That’s the problem with share buybacks generally – they end up being bought near price peaks, the exact time you don’t want to buy them

  4. The “Cleaning Your Bag” piece is just an affiliate link dump to generate some revenue. Though I don’t read Conde Nast Traveler much, maybe that’s every article they post?

    Maybe I’m spoiled from living in such a dry climate, but can’t you just store your bag away for some time and whatever virus or bacteria is on there will die off? They don’t just live forever on a surface without moisture or some other food source. I wipe the bottom of my bag and wheels since they build up a lot of lint/dirt/etc but that’s it, and I’m not a walking pile of germs.

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