The airline industry is not expected to recover its pre-pandemic passenger loads until at least 2023, but airlines hope that figure might need to be revised.
Spring bookings on American Airlines have reached 90 percent of their pre-pandemic volumes, and its domestic flights already are 80 percent full, the airline stated in a recent regulatory filing.
United Airline’s domestic leisure bookings are almost back to 2019 volumes, according to a statement by CEO Scott Kirby, and the carrier will begin hiring 300 more pilots, the airline told current pilots in a memo reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Delta, the last American carrier to continue blocking middle seats, has announced it will begin filling them with passengers on 1 May.
The successful vaccine campaign is “giving us the assurance to offer customers the ability to choose any seat on our aircraft,” Delta CEO Ed Bastain said in a statement announcing the return of the middle seat.
Frontier Group Holdings, whose Frontier Airlines covers the U.S. and Central America from its base in Denver, raised $570 million in its initial public offering this month and reported positive cash flow in March.
Sun Country Airlines Holdings’ IPO brought in $250 million last month. The carrier, which specializes in ferrying Midwesterners to sunny locales down south, said it has now repaid a government loan it took out last October.
The airline industry will book $459 billion in revenue this year, the International Air Transport Association has forecast, about 45 percent below 2019’s level but significantly more than in 2020.
TREND FORECAST: As we have noted when the COVID War was launched last year, with more people working from home and meetings online becoming the new ABnormal, business travel, which accounts for 75 percent of airline profits, will not rebound to previous heights.
However, as we wrote last July, and is now proving itself in the numbers, when “society buys into, and becomes injected with a COVID vaccine, it will free more who fear catching the disease on an airline or in a hotel room, to travel.”
TRENDPOST: While the U.S. economy added 916,000 jobs in March, dropping the unemployment rate to 6 percent, unemployment in the nation’s broad travel industry remains at 13 percent, more than twice the national figure, according to the U.S. Travel Association.
The industry added 280,000 jobs in March, almost a third of the nation’s total gain.
“The rise in leisure and hospitality jobs is a clear sign that an increase in travel and related activities corresponds to an increase in jobs,” association president Roger Dow said in the statement. “However, leisure and hospitality jobs account for almost 40 percent of all U.S. jobs lost in 2020, so we are still way behind in terms of a recovery.”
