People wait in a TSA line at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on June 28, 2022. With summer vacations winding down, airlines are counting on the return of more business travelers to keep their pandemic recovery going into fall 2022. Air travel in the United States, bolstered by huge numbers of tourists, has nearly recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Business travel, however, remains about 25% to 30% below 2019 levels, according to airlines and outfits that track sales.
“The whole challenge for the industry is around the return of the corporate traveler, and whether he is going to come back in enough volume and frequency that is going to help these airlines,” says John Grant, an analyst with travel-data provider OAG. “On the corporate side, it just takes a little more to restart that because there are so many moving parts,” Thackston said. “If you want to go visit clients in New York, it could be that nobody is in the office in New York. That is slowly building back.”
The nature of business travel is changing as companies become accustomed to smaller travel budgets. Some trips are being replaced by video calls, perhaps permanently. Speculative sales trips could be especially easy for companies to cut.