“While the rapid ramp-up in June travel demand provided stability to our financial position, it has impacted our operations following a prolonged period of depressed demand,” Southwest’s chief executive, Gary Kelly, acknowledged in a statement on Thursday. “Therefore, we are intensely focused on improving our operations as we restore our network to meet demand.”
Carriers have also struggled to get workers in place to meet that demand. American suffered shortages of catering and wheelchair operators last month, while it also accelerated pilot training to bring more than 3,000 back from extended leaves. Last week, Ed Bastian, chief executive of Delta, said the airline had struggled to train new or long-sidelined employees.
“It takes a few months, and the demand has come back at such a fast clip,” he said. “It’s taken us all a little bit of time to catch our breath. But we’ll be fully back over the next couple of months.”
One form of travel, trips to visit friends or family within the United States, has generally recovered to 2019 levels, with Southwest saying such leisure travel exceeded 2019 levels in June.
Surveys show that corporate travelers are increasingly eager to get back on the road this fall, when business travel typically picks up. Nearly two-thirds of companies that suspended business travel in the pandemic expect to bring it back over the next one to three months, according to a recent poll from the Global Business Travel Association, an industry association. If other companies follow Apple’s lead in delaying a return to the office, though, the corporate travel recovery could be held back.
Delta said it expected domestic business trips to recover to about 60 percent of 2019 levels by September, up from 40 percent in June. Those figures roughly align with estimates from United.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/business/airlines-united-american-southwest-delta.html
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