Southwest Airlines
Q1 2022 Earnings Call
Apr 28, 2022, 12:30 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good day, and welcome to the Southwest Airlines first quarter 2022 conference call. My name is Chad, and I will be moderating today's call. This call is being recorded, and a replay will be available on southwest.com in the investor relations section. [Operator instructions] At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr.
Ryan Martinez, vice president of investor relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Ryan Martinez -- Vice President, Investor Relations
Thank you, Chad, and thank you all for joining us today. In just a moment, we will share our prepared remarks and then open it up for Q&A. Joining me on the call today, we have our CEO Bob Jordan, Executive Vice President and CFO Tammy Romo, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Watterson, and President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Van de Ven. A quick reminder that we will make forward-looking statements today, which are based on our current expectations of future performance, and our actual results could differ substantially from these expectations.
Also, we had a few special items in our first quarter results, which we excluded from our trends for non-GAAP purposes, and we will reference these non-GAAP results in our remarks. Please see our press release from this morning and our IR website for more information, our cautionary statements and our non-GAAP reconciliation for more detail. With that, Bob, I'll turn it over to you.
Bob Jordan -- Chief Executive Officer
All right. Well, thank you, Ryan. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us today.
Well, the first quarter was a tale of two really different environments. As expected, we incurred losses in January and February due to the negative impacts of the Omicron variant. We anticipated travel demand would rebound in March, and we were pleasantly surprised at how quickly it bounced back and the extent to which demand and bookings surged. While we reported a Q1 loss, we were solidly profitable in March, actually not too far off of March 2019's profit.
And while modest, I'm very pleased that first quarter unit revenues increased as compared to 2019. That was the first quarterly increase since the onset of the pandemic. So -- but for the Omicron impact, we estimate that we would have been profitable for the first quarter. In the first quarter, total operating revenues were 91% restored to 2019 levels despite Q1 managed business revenues being only 45% restored.