Chief Executive Officer & Director, Delta Air Lines, Inc
Delta Delves Into Innovation, CEO Outlines Plan for Future of Travel
Ed Bastian became the first-ever airline CEO to deliver the keynote address at CES where he outlined a number of futuristic visions for the airline.
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About Edward Bastian
Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines, said in a May 2026 interview that rising jet fuel prices, which he described as having doubled within 60 days, were influencing ticket prices. He stated that Delta was absorbing about 50% of the cost increase and passing about 50% on to pricing. Bastian also addressed Delta’s decision to remove food and beverage offerings on flights 350 miles and under, attributing it to service timing issues rather than cost-cutting. He commented on the broader economy, saying the higher-end consumer was doing “exceptionally well” while lower-earning consumers were struggling. During Delta’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call in April, Bastian reported record revenue growth of nearly 10% and earnings 40% higher than the prior year, despite a significant fuel cost increase. He noted that Delta was reducing capacity in the current quarter with a “downward bias” until the fuel situation improves. In March 2026, Bastian criticized Congress for a lack of leadership during a partial government shutdown that affected TSA staffing, saying Delta had suspended congressional flight perks because Delta would “not continue to extend courtesy opportunities for them to bypass the mess they’ve created.”
Transcript (11 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Edward Bastian0:00
That was a marker for us. We've been on a journey, and you know, you look, you follow the airlines, they've had a checkered past. We're about ready to enter our second century of operation, you know, as an industry and as Delta, and we've never been stronger. We've never been better. The demand has never been more prevalent. The interest in travel has never been greater, and we're now making investments in the billions of dollars a year in airport and ground and digital technology and infrastructure. And we wanted to give a vision of what travel in five years will be like on Delta.
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Interviewer0:32
We're gonna show a list of all the things you guys announced at the keynote, and I want to go through some of them. I mean, the deeper integration with live chat, this parallel reality, how are you prioritizing the innovations at Delta?
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Edward Bastian0:44
The biggest challenge for us right now for a customer is the ground experience. We've done a lot to improve the flight experience. We've updated, and actually our fleet, about in the last five years, we've completely replaced one-third of our fleet, doing billions, and we continue to replace airplanes. But now we got to replace the ground infrastructure. So we're building LaGuardia, we're building in LA, we're building in Seattle, all the places where those airports haven't been touched in 50, 60, 70 years. And so with that, we're bringing services into the infrastructure, such as lifts that can help distress the environment for customers to navigate.
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Interviewer1:25
So what I'm hearing is that the most important thing for flyers is actually not when they're up in the air, it's all the time that they spend before they get on the plane.
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Edward Bastian1:34
We want our customers to have a great experience at all parts of the journey, and we have an extended part of the journey, not just when you arrive or not just move. And you know, we talked yesterday about what if, you know, we were able to pick your bag up at home and have it waiting for you when you arrive at your destination, or maybe already getting there before you. It all comes to taking stress out of the process.
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Interviewer1:57
Okay, I got to talk about Wi-Fi. I mean, JetBlue, the only carrier right now that has it. You guys are the number one airline in the world. When are we gonna get Wi-Fi on Delta?
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Edward Bastian2:05
Well, we have Wi-Fi on Delta, and it really works well. Free Wi-Fi is your question, yeah. And we're gonna get it within the next two years. You don't want me to turn it on quite yet to make it free because what it will do is crash the system. But we're investing aggressively in that goal. Within the next two years, you're gonna have Wi-Fi that'll be the best in the world, best in the industry with speed and in quality, and it's at the same price, which is what it should be, which is free. And then it opens up a whole new frontier. You think about the distribution platform with 200 million customers a year that we have, and on average we have them for three hours of session, 600 million hours. And then when you think about what we can do in terms of content and controlling that distribution with the studios.
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Interviewer2:49
Well, I do want to applaud you for expanding your in-flight entertainment. You're partnering up with Reframe to offer more female-led films. Talk about the in-flight experience a little more.
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Edward Bastian2:58
Oh, well, the in-flight experience has substantially improved. We've added a whole lot of new options for customers to fly different products, you know, both international as well as domestic. We talk about in-flight entertainment, yeah. One thing we're doing is we're making certain we continue to add more and more seatback screens onto our planes. Most airlines are actually taking seatback screens off the planes. We're adding more on. The reason for it is we've got a product in-house that we've developed to make a wireless in-flight seatback, and it's taken the box out from underneath the seat in front of you, so you can actually have more legroom, and actually gives us the opportunity to update content. Well, now you can watch before you get on the plane, right at the gate, which is very cool.
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Interviewer3:38
Last year, 2019, flight shaming became a thing, right? Greta Thunberg talked a lot about it. She sailed around the world. How are you combating this? How do you respond to those who feel that they should fly less?
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Edward Bastian3:47
Significant issue for the industry. I talked about it as being the existential threat for us, and I'm critical of our industry and critical of ourselves. Yeah, we've been talking in a passive voice about things that we should be doing less of. What we should be talking instead is what we're doing more of. First of all, air travel is incredibly important. You would not have seen us if it wasn't for air travel, let's be honest. So we need to bring the world together. The world needs more unity, needs more understanding, needs more human connection, not virtual connection, human connection to make a difference.