“Given these considerations and our current outlook for the business, we expect our annual total return on capital to shareholders to be at least equal to our free cash flow over the next few years.”

In context

“we think about our capital structure and allocation framework going forward, we are focused on growing returns for our shareholders whilst appropriately investing in our business and maintaining our strong investment grade credit ratings. We will target maintaining a gross leverage ratio of about 2%, which is about in line with the historic levels. On a net leverage basis, we have started to run the business with negative net leverage. However, we plan on moving gradually through addition our positive net leverage targeting about 1x net leverage over time. We believe managing our capital structure with these targets will allow us to maintain our strong investment grade credit ratings whilst also generating additional capacity for returning capital to shareholders as our EBITDA increases. Given these considerations and our current outlook for the business, we expect our annual total return on capital to shareholders to be at least equal to our free cash flow over the next few years. In 2019, we started the year with $4.5 billion remaining under our share repurchase organization that was approved in the prior year. And in the second quarter 2019, our Board of Directors approved a new $15 billion authorization. Since the start of 2019, we repurchased the full $4.5 billion under prior authorization and have repurchased $11.1 billion under the $15 billion authorization, leaving us with $3.9 billion remaining at the end of last year. We are announcing today that our Board of Directors has approved a new share repurchase authorization of $20 billion that we will begin utilizing after we complete the current authorization. We expect to complete the share repurchases under the cumulative $24 billion authorization within the next 4 years, assuming that travel continues to rec”