Yves here. Hubert Horan hasn’t written recently about the sorry state of the airline industry, since Wolf’s update confirms that events are hewing to his forecast. Nevertheless, airline execs and investors are presumably chuffed that 1. The current stimulus plan has yet more bailout money for them and 2. They have every reason to think that Buttigieg will take keeping the money spigot open as one of his top priorities.
The other reason to keep an eye on airlines is as a proxy for business travel and the health of related activities, like conferences and hotels. Hotel rates in New York are a shocker.
By Wolf Richter, editor at Wolf Street. Originally published at Wolf Street
United, the US airline with the most flights to China, started suspending some flights between the US and Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong in the first week of February 2020 due to a “significant decline in demand,” it said at the time as the then new coronavirus was spreading. “We will continue to monitor the situation as it develops and will adjust our schedule as needed,” it said. This was followed by flight suspensions and travel bans across the globe. By April, the airline passenger business had collapsed. So where are we now?
Over the past seven days, not quite 707,000 passengers per day on average passed TSA checkpoints at US airports, a measure of how many passengers in the US are flying somewhere. This was down by 61.6% from the same period in 2019, the last full year of the Good Times. At the end of January, the drop from 2019 was over 65%.
Amid all the ups and downs, there still hasn’t been much improvement in terms of airline passenger traffic in the US since last September:
Over the past year, the normal seasonal increases and decreases have been replaced by what may be a new pattern, also with seasonal changes, but different changes. Business travel for all kinds of meetings and conferences – the most lucrative end for airlines – has remained very sparse. And the seasonality of business travel has largely faded from the chart.
And the seasonality of leisure travel has been upended by travel restrictions for foreign vacation destinations and reluctance by many people to get anywhere the inside of an airport just to have fun for a week somewhere else. Driving vacations and RVs have become hot.
In the chart below, the bold red line shows the seven-day moving average of the number of air travelers who passed through TSA checkpoints daily from March 1, 2020, through February 7, 2021. The thin red line indicates the daily number of screenings. The green lines show the same for 2019:
Collapsed revenues and astronomical losses, still.
For the fourth quarter, revenues of the six largest US airlines combined – American, Delta, United, Southwest, Alaska, and JetBlue, with Spirit not having reported yet – plunged by 65.9% from a year earlier. For the year 2020, revenues plunged by 62.7%.
For the fourth quarter, those six airlines combined reported a net loss of $6.6 billion; for the year 2020, they reported a net loss of $34.1 billion.
The airline industry has invented a term to track the performance of the airlines in this environment – “daily cash burn” – to allow folks to calculate at the current rate of daily cash burn how long the airlines can continue to service their debts.
The airlines have piled up mountains of cash from a series of government bailouts, most of them grants, and from the craziest financial markets of all times, created by the Fed, that allowed the airlines to sell more shares and tons of debt.
The airlines have pledged their frequent flyer programs as collateral which allowed Delta, for example, to borrow another $9 billion. They have sold old aircraft, including to Amazon for freighter conversions. They have engaged in sale-lease-backs of their aircraft to raise cash. They have done everything imaginable to each raise many billions of dollars of cash to burn through this year.
Even if business eventually goes back to “normal” – whatever that may mean and however many years this may still take, amid growing industry suspicions that the lucrative business travel segment may never go back to the old normal – those huge mountains of debt will stay.
fcMeanwhile, back in the financial markets…
Forget the collapse in revenues and the astronomical losses and ongoing cash-burn and the hellish pile of debt these airlines now have… as has become standard practice in the craziest financial markets ever, airline shares have soared, with the WOLF STREET index of the largest 7 airlines more than doubling since April, and aiming back toward levels before the crisis, including gains of nearly 5% today:
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I somewhat suspect air Canada listed flights during the pandemic knowing they would cancel but then they could keep peoples money…
Booked a flight home to NZ last year – when I first looked only air Canada (with several layovers…) was available.
After I booked they proceeded to reschedule it several times then outright cancelled it.
No way in hell we’re they giving out refunds either. 8 weeks or so later I got some ‘flight vouchers’ I can use on their airline one day apparently.
Perhaps it’s time you accepted that your home is where you are right now. If you’ve come to rely on possibly the most climate-damaging form of movement ever invented as a means to go home, you’ve made a serious mistake.
Hmm making cement generates around 10% of CO2…passanger aviation is cca 5%. Just for the perspective…
James, so presumably your suggestion for people who may need to cross the pacific to get home is to do it by ship?
I’ve never traveled aboard a long-distance liner, but I rather like the sound of taking a ship home, especially if airlines won’t fly me there. I’ve heard that some agencies will book the spare cabins in freighters to travelers at decent rates, but I have no idea what the pandemic has done to that.
No workplace will give its hamster wheel normals the time needed to take a ship anywhere. Its either fly or don’t go.
I have never seen bookable cabins in freighters despite often travelling on one of Europe’s busiest freight crossings and looking for them quite often. Also, travelling from Canada to NZ on a freighter would take at least three weeks, possibly more than a month. Do you really want to be on a freighter that long?
Freighter cruises are surprisingly common and popular, arguably more so in a post Covid environment.
Sorry, many of us didn’t learn about climate change until after forming families that span oceans. Part of family is elder care, or just seeing each other if that’s allowed. I make myself feel better by thinking that aerosols from my plane help offset some warming.
I’d love to take a freighter. If my destination country would accept the crossing as the quarantine period it would be perfect.
The only thing that keeps the charismatic megafauna of Africa alive is that it makes tourism money for Africa, including now for villages and villagers near where the charismafauna live. And the tourists get there by plane.
If we ban tourist flying to Africa, there won’t be any more tourist money to justify permitting the charismafauna animals to live. And they will all be driven extinct to turn their land into farmland and cattle land.
No more air travel? No more African megafauna. Don’t believe it? Ban air travel and lets find out.
It feels good to recycle, to compost, to convert from coal to natural gas to green electricity, etc etc. And if you can buy an electric car, or just use public transportation, and if you can stay off of air lines…. good for you. St. Peter may welcome you. But those individual choices, even as the number of adherents to ‘healthy choices’ grows, are almost inconsequential in the face of the changes that need to occur and the actions needed to be taken.
Do it because it feels good, feels right, and is something that perhaps you wish everyone in the world could do (or had the privilege to do). You want to save the planet? Study the insidious effects of capitalism and the exploitation of our earth by, for instance, the military-industrial complex, or more keenly, any of the characteristic foundations of corporate capitalism. No amount of recycling or refusal to fly airplanes will put a dent in those core destructive forces and alliances.
Your heart may be in the right place, but let’s join in thinking about, and taking action, where it matters– for instance with groups like Socialist Alternative, or even more simply by supporting (even, better, organizing for) your local unions.
Air Canada has been consistently refusing to give refunds, and disputing DOT authority.
https://paxex.aero/air-canada-refund-complaint-dot-dispute/
I just hope that pax remember this… and fly accordingly in the future.
I had to get my credit provider to refund when Qantas cancelled my flight and made it difficult to get anything but vouchers.
Took a quick look to see the relative sizes of the top ten airlines in North America and found that seven of them were American, two Canadian and one Mexican. Thing is, about this time last year I would have placed a bet on several airlines merging into more efficient, smaller (temporarily) airlines as a result of demand dropping off a cliff. Perhaps I missed it but I cannot really recall any news about airline mergers much in the news. It seems that the US government, for example, has adopted a no-airline-left-behind policy-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_airlines_in_North_America
And I still find it disturbing that over 700,000 people are flying each and every day.
Perhaps others with more knowledge on this could comment, but I suspect that one reason there are no mergers is that if you have two public companies merging, they their internal financial guts will become open to scrutiny by the financial markets and media. And for people in the industry (and their funders), this may be too horrifying a prospect to face.
Merging costs money, and the process of buying shares of another company will drive these shares up. No airline has money to waste.
Lufthansa, as one example, in 2019 had operational costs of about 37 billion €, with 9 billion € staff cost. It had earnings of about 36.4 billion €, with 2.4 billion € in the logistics sector.
Assuming the logistics earnings didn’t dive (to keep things simple), then of the remaining 34 billion, assuming 60% earnings loss due to corona, there will still be 13.6 + 2.4 billion earnings left => 16 billion.
Of course this calculation is naive, but it shows the magnitude of the problem: 37 bill. € costs against 16 bill. earnings €.
No private entity with at least a small bit of sanity left will lend enough money to companies in a situation like this, regardless of whether this is merge corpse or not (a private entity with that much money to spare will wait and buy the company at the time of bankruptcy).
Only the states can help their airlines, and they most certainly attach strings to that offer: “do not lay off” (state never learn, i think).
There are some other problems, too:
– even machines not flying need maintenance,
– airlines often have long-time contracts with airports,
– anti trust laws are likely to prohibit some (or even many) mergers.
Besides, you just can’t “merge into smaller”. It doesn’t work that way. You merge, and then you resize. Or you resize, and then merge.
I’m not going to cry or gloat over the collapse in air travel. I’m simply going to note that the recent NC piece showing that if your business is on a platform you don’t really have a viable business is very pertinent here. I am quite eclectic in my YouTube viewing. One area I like is aviation. I can’t help feeling that all those YouTubers and Patreon hosted channels are in more trouble than they realise. Fewer watch and advertisers won’t touch them.
With covid variants appearing quickly and predictions that it’ll be 2024 before any “new normal” is established, I can’t help thinking that an “online biz” on platforms based on flying is not a good place to be. Anecdotally I see moves by the savvier more experienced commentators to move toward re-analysis of past aircraft disasters and suchlike to stay relevant. Given costs these days of becoming a pilot I feel sorry for those who (like students) have incurred huge debts getting a qualification in a potentially dying industry.
I share your interest in random aviation youtube channels, there are some really interesting ones out there. And as you say, many have gone fairly quiet recently, or are just doing aircrash clickbait videos. I do wonder if those who employed in the airline industry have been given a list of verboten subjects, one of which is the current financial situation of the industry.
Maybe its a quirk of the algorithms too, but I’ve seen a noticeable silence over any discussion of the situation in aircraft construction. Its not just Boeing – a raft of new regional jets have been put on ice or killed off the last year, most noticeably the Sukhoi and Mitsubishi aircraft. Bombardier and Embraer are becoming irrelevant and Comac is only kept going through Beijings insistence (and probably mountains of cash they’ll never see again). We all know about Boeing of course. Airbus could end up the last company standing in a few years. But nobody seems to want to talk about this.
I wondered if I was being bad-minded but clearly not if you’ve noticed it too. The “usual suspects” are definitely silent over the finances of new aircraft (with only the obviously finance-uninformed people talking up the prospects for various new aircraft).
I feel sorry for those who continue to buy into the “old normal”, believing this is just a blip. I don’t comment as it doesn’t change minds. I just think “you should be retraining or repositioning and fast”. I simply don’t believe the airline industry will ever attain its previous heights.
As someone who can remember the UAL Pension Dismount and succeeding misery (misery that continues today) this is only justified. But, the Airlines will come out very profitable from this as they continue their merge into freight operations – something which the death of brick & mortar retail help facilitate. The bailouts are just free money to investors, and are probably some of the most wasteful expenditures the US government has ever spent recently (competing hard with the money they gave to ISPs to upgrade networks). It’s easy to do anyway – most airliners can be configured to accept both humans and pallets in the same compartments.
A larger, more technical economic study could be done: almost every major transportation industry has dropped passenger for freight at some point. Marine shippers being first followed shortly by railroads, then Greyhound divesting from local lines now this. Perhaps as airlines retract passenger service we’d see advocacy for a state-subsidized service. If this goes down like it did with the railroads, the tipping point will only come when DC itself is left without daily flight service.
Only then would the government step in to obtain passenger assets, by which point it’d be too late for most of the country that will have their commercial air services destroyed indefinitely. Many of the things we now take for granted, eg airlines boarding at specific terminals or multiple airports per region, would be eliminated from the air system as they were from the ground system. That would certainly be quite the cultural adjustment.. imagine NYC, LA or Chicago only having 1 commercial airport per.
Of course, international and individual private planes are different and speak to the growing economic stratification of society.
On the bright side, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of mega-polluters.
There has been a drastic drop in new CO2, but not enough to lessen the overall load. For that we need a way to extract CO2 from the upper layers of the atmosphere. You’d think that effort would require all the airplanes we’ve got and then some. Like, can we make all those planes attract CO2 like cat hair?
I’m old enough to remember when the term “jet set” was in common use. Meaning that flying was something reserved for the well-to-do. If you weren’t of that social class, you drove somewhere for vacation, and, when you got there, you camped.
One other factor that must be hitting their revenues hard is that I suspect a high proportion of travellers now are much less date dependant, so can afford to wait for the cheapest flights. I have two friends here from Asian countries who have negotiated with their employers that they can work from their home countries for a few months. They told me that there are flights with major airlines as cheap as 550 euro, when usually 700euro would be the very cheapest available. As they are waiting for a safe ‘window’ to travel they can afford to be patient and get the very lowest priced flights available. They are also, I think, wisely avoiding the Middle Eastern hubs.
I suspect this also applies to the many Europeans who are spending several months working from their home countries instead of their countries of employment (in the area around the Google and FB HQ’s in Dublin, the apartment buildings around are noticeably dark at night, I suspect a very high proportion of their employees have chosen to work from their parents home or somewhere like Portugal where they can rent cheaply). Aer Lingus is sending me emails asking me to consider working from ‘home’ somewhere by the Mediterranean (very tempting I have to say). People in those situations can be choosy about their flight dates.
And also of course there are no more ‘peak’ periods around school holidays or local festivals that are always highly profitable for the airlines.
Oh, and to make life even worse, fuel prices are starting to inch upwards.
This isn’t a sector I follow closely, but given that there has not been much reporting to indicate that some airlines or leasing companies are going bust (the exception being Cathay Pacific, deliberately throttled by Beijing), I suspect that there is a game going on where nobody wants to be the one to admit that they are on a sinking vessel, so the cash transfusions keep coming and a lot of blind eyes are being turned to unpaid bills/debts. We will only see the real damage next year if and when things start to ‘recover’ and it becomes unsustainable to keep companies operating with such high debt loads.
Right now there’s a splendid internal debate over the future of these companies. It’s freight, freight, freight – this is where all the gov’t grant money went because that generates a positive ROI. There are ready customers (including Amazon) and infrastructure to plug into. In my experience the issues are human elements… security checkpoints are still stuck in the post 9/11 era and not Amazon-style high capacity turnstiles. Upgrades like this allow for more efficient employee throughput, increasing ROI per hire. Same for the cargo itself: more parking zones and more warehouses make transloading much faster. I suspect that this will be the next space for “innovation” – moving things from ISO containers to air containers still requires a 4-gang crew. This won’t stay.
Outside, they have to be quiet. For this entire operation to work they have to present a unified space and appear vulnerable. It’s got them this far and ensures that cities and municipalities are willing to grant build permits at airports without problems. It also avoids criticism of other things airlines do, like outsourcing repair and maintence to mexico. I think that latter problem is eventually going to become a scandal and one which turns a lot of people against them.
The airlines in the US are infrastructure. However much you hate it, they are a major part of the transportation system. And – in the US – they are mass transit. Other countries have railroads that work. If the airlines go down in a disorderly fashion, long distance travel in the US becomes very problematic. The bailout simply tries to buy the airlines time – keep the assets in tact with the hopes that air travel recovers. Regardless of how dire the current situation is, if the vaccines bail out our bacon, there is so much pent up demand that you would have a hard time finding an empty seat in the fall. No one knows how this plays out and the stock price of the airlines is just speculation:GME by another name.
The policy aspect of deciding to keep our existing carriers afloat (vs. letting most/all of them bk, liquidate, etc.) is much under-discussed. I’d like a discussion that fully accounts for whose wealth is being protected, what the alternatives might look like, etc. Clearly there are other ways to protect the employees financially. Do we not think it is remotely plausible that, following a severe contraction in the industry (several carriers liquidate) that, once demand resumes, new carriers would be formed at appropriate scale and routes? I realize there is a lot of complexity (pensions, bondholders, the aircraft support industry) but to not even discuss the idea that we allow the industry to contract severely seems amiss.
I suspect that US airlines may be relatively (!) sheltered from the worst effects because of the large domestic market. In Europe, there are a number of countries which are too small for domestic airlines (Belgium?) and whose airlines are in practice dependent on international routes. Within that, as several people have noted, business travel accounts for nearly all the actual profits. Even if aircraft full of young people on a weekend drunk in Prague or somewhere start flying again, this isn’t going to do much for the collective bottom line. And of course Europe is now connected by high-speed and efficient rail networks: it would be unusual for business travellers these days to fly from Brussels to Paris or Rotterdam.
BRussels to Paris train time is about 3 hours. Given that that’s pretty much the minimum time you have to spend to get to the airport, cross the security, wait there, fly and the same on the other side, there’s zero time incentive to do so.
There’s not even a cost incentive now, especially when you add the cost of getting to/from the airport.
And, three hours on the train you can do something, while with air travel you have a lots of dead-time you can’t do anything except hope it passes quickly.
Four hours is considered the happy spot in high speed rail travel when it comes to competing with air travel. Any more time on the train and people see the speed advantages of a flight – less than that and train wins most times. This is one reason why high speed rail is unlikely ever to be viable in the US – quite simply, the main big cities are too far apart and the low density of development often means that the airport is closer to many residents than a downtown rail hub.
The ‘cheap’ alternative to high speed rail for business or time sensitive travel is overnight sleeping cars, which unfortunately are becoming a rare species, but I believe there is increasing interest in Europe in investing to bring them back.
To be clear, the actual time you spend on the train (the Thalys) is about an hour and twenty-five minutes. When I lived in the centre of Paris I reckoned that taxi-train-taxi I could go from home to a meeting in Brussels in two and a half hours, which no airline could possible match.
Having hardly flown domestically since the turn of the century, you can’t miss what you don’t do, so no biggie for us, but my sisters were often 6 miles high as a way of life, one up in the air 4-5 days a week for work (she loved it-we all thought of what hell it would be) and then Bang! they go cold turkey on the aroma of spent jet fuel while awaiting their luggage @ baggage claim.
In our family Zoom jams in the spring, they were all so full of plans to be on planes, but they’ve since realized how limited their possibilities are, along with the yearning. Trying to get a family trip to converge in cars in Chaco Canyon going for the spring.
Road trips seem the same since Covid, better seating than those metal tubes they stuff you in aloft, even if it takes longer to get to-and they are tougher to cross oceans in. Eat whatever you like and thanks to the code of the road, all the junk/fast food you consume along the way has no calories, in fact its full of reverse calorie stuff such as a sundae that takes away 845 calories of nourishment and tastes so good doing so. Guilt free, as opposed to the guilty as charged atmosphere of an airport, count me out.
Flying seems like it will relegated to the precious few who can afford it, once government support fails to keep the financial levitating act going.
We will effectively taken the speed limit for travel down to around 100 mph
Technically, if you go to in-n-out between 2 pm and 3pm it neither counts for lunch, nor for dinner!
Little known facts help one get through the day don’t they?
@Wukchumni — I like the way you do calories.
I’m here to serve man.
There you go, talkin up your big, bad cookbook again ??
Let me guess .. Pepsi, No Grok!
All these words above and below the line about airlines and not one about climate change. Why is that? Are readers of NC afraid to admit that flying will never be remotely environmentally sustainable? There are no magic inventions which are, like fusion energy, always ten years away from rescuing airlines. If we are serious about rescuing our species from likely destruction, we will have to give up flying. Not in the future. Now. No more cheap getaways from here in the UK to Eastern Europe or Spain. No more climate justice conferences attended by middle-class, white activists from all around the planet. Flying, like capitalism, is incompatible with the long-term survival of complex life. Or, as seems increasingly to be true, the middle term.
The death of air travel couldn’t come at a better time, except maybe 20 years ago with the 9/11 scare. The problem is that this sentiment is not a popular one. To really embrace it, you’d be dancing on the grave of treasured vacations and the “noble sacrifice” of business trips, not to mention a great many lost jobs in the sector. So, perhaps we are dancing quietly in our seats, if not the aisles.
This all can’t be good for Boeing, either. It’s hard to imagine much demand for the 737-Max now.
The problem is figuring out what if anything would replace air travel. Most forms of conveyance get efficiencies of scale from batching lots of travelers at a time that make them susceptible to viral epidemics. We’d be looking at some sort of small pod based travel so that household quarantine groups travel together. Maybe hyperloop has this potential, but I don’t see that built out rapidly. At least not in the US with its everything is too expensive to invest in anything mentality. That is why we can’t have nice things.
What about long supply chains? The most frequent flyers i know are mba’s.
Used to sit to one of those when I was in a coworking space. Haven’t spoken with her in a while, but I suspect that a lot of what she used to do via air travel and in-person meetings is now accomplished on Zoom.
TBH, air travel pales in comparison to other things as far as CO2 emission go, it’s about ~3% of the total world emissions.
And it’s a big question what will people who can’t fly do, assuming that they will do nothing just because they can’t fly doesn’t work. If say they will go on a driving holidays, they may well end up emitting more than before.
Sitting in front of a telly watching Netflix is not CO2 free either, the AWS data centres powering Netflix, the internet infrastructure, and the energy in your home are all CO2 emitters as well. By what I can find on a quick google, an hour of netflix is about the same as 11 miles drive on a fairly CO2 efficient car (3.2kg emited, assuming 280g/mile car). Sure, a Netflix binge weekend is still not the same as a weekend flight somewhere, but the number of people who binge on Netflix compared to those who fly is quite large.
Looking at one thing in isolation will never work properly.
Along the same lines of nothing existing in a vacuum, if we’re going to cheer the end of air travel and also be good, woke liberals, then we need to acknowledge the tens of thousands of low wage workers around the world whose livelihoods are directly or indirectly tied to business travel and tourism. I’m thinking hotel maids, cooks, taxi drivers, tour guides, waiters, bar tenders, pool cleaners, etc.
Do you suppose that there is nothing else useful for these people to do?
Maybe there is. But do you think all of those people involved in the hospitality and tourism industry in far flung places are doing it for the glory or because its the best and perhaps only paycheck in town?
Or perhaps planes will become EVs of the air? Though it may be as realistic as the flying car future of my yout’, electric aircraft seems a worthy project, given that planes mostly operate above the clouds, where sun power is “free.” Of course that begs the question re: what’s the purpose of most air travel?
The issue of big money giveaways to the US carriers is very troubling. While defended as “protecting jobs”, it’s another demo of that old adage of privatizing gains/socializing losses. Given the way the majors bought their stock on the open market for several years prior to the crash in air travel (coincidentally driving up share prices, goosing the compensation of the C-suite folk) why didn’t “we” receive collateral for our “investment” in their survival. As I recall, one good thing about the GM bailout in the previous crisis was that “we” received an equity stake for our investment to keep GM afloat, actually turning a profit on the investment. Is there any good reason that didn’t happen this time, other than that most everyone was focused on the daily craziness coming from the Grifter, rather than what our favorite congresscritters were up to?
Anecdotally, in the past couple of months I’ve had friends who had to fly to eastern Europe to visit sick parents; friends who flew to Hawaii from the east coast for a family reunion; friends whose kids have flown home from university the UK; and three different friends who flew to the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Costa Rice for vacation. None of them got sick. For me the lesson here is that flying is safe with a modicum of common sense, basically wearing a mask. I’ve taken advantage of the great fares available now for some flights this summer.
Risk is not zero. be careful.
“By combining information on disease progression, travel dynamics and genomic analysis, we conclude that at least four in-flight transmission events of SARS-CoV-2 likely took place,” the study states. “Four of these six related genome sequences were from Switzerland, the country of origin of the suspected index case.”
“Of the seven infected individuals, five had tested negative within 48 hours before the flight. The authors of the article say the “transmission events occurred despite reported use of masks and gloves in-flight,” and that stringent masking was required by the airline operating the flight.
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s18/client/snv?noteGuid=e152536c-dac6-4185-9e82-e54e48b59ea0¬eKey=2b22fd11a02c95208c61033e8a9f7c95&sn=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.evernote.com%2Fshard%2Fs18%2Fsh%2Fe152536c-dac6-4185-9e82-e54e48b59ea0%2F2b22fd11a02c95208c61033e8a9f7c95&title=New%2BZealand%2Bcovid-19%2Bflight%2Boutbreak%2Blinked%2Bto%2Bpassenger%2Bwho%2Btested%2Bnegative%2B-%2BThe%2BWashington%2BPost
Might be worth the risk, but do take care.
Yes, it’s not hard to postulate an infection risk that would be quite compatible with those observations but still high enough to be significant – say 2% to 5%, for example, which would also be in line with the study observations.
Everyone’s situation is different and it might be an acceptable risk in some circumstances, but it’s definitely there.
My admittedly two decade old information on airline economics told me that the real money earners for them was the relatively small number of travelers in business and first class – the majority of the seats were filled with low revenue passengers. If the business travel doesn’t come back will the coach class tickets be enough to get by on? Maybe someone has insight on to how things look for the future of business travel after more than a year of replacing as much travel as possible with online tools etc. It seems like it could be an attractive cost saving for businesses if they could cut air travel as much as possible.