Airline Traffic Climbs Again— But It’s Mostly Leisure, Not Corporate
The good news is that air travel is slowly coming back: each day, the Transportation Security Administration traffic count shows improvement. But corporate travel, the most profitable segment for airlines, is lagging.
The trend continued Tuesday. TSA reported Wednesday that on Tuesday it cleared 190,477 people through airport security, the busiest Tuesday since March 23. However, the count (which includes airport and airline employees) was still just 8% of the level on the same date in 2019.
“It’s certainly a lot less dark in here than it was a few months ago,” Scott Kirby said Wednesday on CNBC, during an interview marking his first day as CEO, after stepping up from president. “In April, we hit the bottom.” TSA numbers show a low point of 87,534 passengers on Tuesday, April 14, just 4% of the number on the same date a year earlier.
Kirby said United now carries 35,000 to 40,000 passengers a day, better than on the April days when it was carrying 10,000 a day, but not near the half million a day it carried in February before the coronavirus crisis upended commercial aviation. Among the passengers, he said, are medical workers and people who “visit critically ill loved-ones.
“Most of our customers are really not discretionary: they need to travel,” Kirby said.
“We do see a lot of pent-up demand,” Kirby said. For instance, as national parks have opened, United has seen “a huge spike in demand” to gateway cities to those parks.
“When business travel does come back, I think it comes back first in our hubs,” Nocella noted. “Our hubs are in the biggest business centers.”
On the American call, Don Casey, senior vice president of revenue, said “large corporations aren’t doing a lot of traveling,” while President Robert Isom noted, “People want to get out and start traveling from a business perspective. We do see signs that things are starting to open up.”
When travel returns, “We do anticipate it will be domestic focused,” Isom said. “It will be a very long time for international to come back.”
