by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
L-Shaped Recovery for Air Lines. Staking their future on a vaccine.
American Airlines on Friday, and Delta Air Lines on Thursday, warned about once-again slowing bookings. The highly profitable business air travel segment remains essentially in zombie-status, but leisure travel perked up a little in recent months, and over Thanksgiving inched up further by a microscopic amount. But total travel remains woefully down from last year even during the best day, and is now heading lower again.
The number of passengers going through TSA checkpoints to enter the secured areas at US airports during the post-Thanksgiving week through Saturday, December 5, compared to the same weekday in the same week last year, showed the deterioration: between -64.2% and -69.2%. And what the airlines warned about is a decline of bookings from these already low levels.