Alaska Air Group
Q1 2022 Earnings Call
Apr 21, 2022, 11:30 a.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good morning. My name is Charlie and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Alaska Air Group's 2022 first quarter earnings release conference call. Today's call is being recorded and will be accessible for future playback at the alaskaair.com.
[Operator instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Alaska Air Group's vice president of finance, Emily Halverson.
Emily Halverson -- Managing Director of Investor Relations
Thank you, operator, and good morning. Thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2022 earnings call. This morning we issued our earnings release, which is available at investor.alaskaair.com. On today's call, you'll hear updates from Ben, Andrew, and Shane.
Several others of our management team are also on the line to answer your questions during the Q&A portion of the call. This morning, Air Group reported a first quarter GAAP net loss of $143 million. Excluding special items and mark to market fuel hedge adjustments, Air Group reported an adjusted net loss of $167 million. As a reminder, our comments today will include forward-looking statements about future performance, which may differ materially from our actual results.
Information on risk factors that could affect our business can be found in our SEC filings. We will also refer to certain non-GAAP measures such as adjusted earnings and unit costs, excluding fuel. And as usual, we've provided a reconciliation between the most directly comparable GAAP and non-GAAP measures in today's earnings release. Over to you, Ben.
Ben Minicucci -- Chief Operating Officer
Thanks, Emily, and good morning, everyone. Despite a slow start to the year in January and February, March results were very strong. In March, we recorded Air Group's highest ever cash sales, 13% above our prior best month. And for the first time since the pandemic began, March revenues exceeded their 2019 comp.
This was driven by strength in both leisure and business demand, with leisure currently more than 100% recovered, and business demand now at 70% of 2019. As demand strength has carried into the second quarter and throughout the summer, we issued guidance today indicating that we expect to deliver double digit percentage increases in both unit revenues and yields versus 2019. And the second quarter guidance reflects line of sight to double digit pre-tax margin for the quarter. Given we expect to deliver profits in Q2 and for the remainder of the year, we are reiterating our full year pre-tax margin guidance of 6% to 9% for 2022, even with the higher fuel prices we are experiencing today.