Airfare sales arrive despite concerns
“Dreaming of summer?” a recent tweet from Frontier Airlines asks. “We can take you there. Fly from $11.”
Not to be left out, fellow low-cost carrier Allegiant sent an email this week advertising late-summer deals as low as $24 each way. And in its own email, Southwest had this suggestion: “Set your sights on summer travel with a $49 fare.”
Cue the record-scratch sound effect. Do they mean this summer, age of the coronavirus pandemic, era of uncertainty about when most nonessential travel will return?
The short answer is yes. “We know that people will have the need to travel in the near future and, as is our standard practice, we want to make it affordable and easy for them,” Sonya Padgett, a spokeswoman for Allegiant, said in an email. “That’s why, like most airlines, we are offering deals on fares.”
But the longer answer, according to airfare expert Rick Seaney, is that carriers are probably fishing around to find out what their customers’ interest is.
“It’s about, essentially, trying to look like it’s business as usual, but mostly, it’s about probing and getting more information,” said Mr. Seaney, chief executive of travel-data-science company 3Victors. “The more information they get, the better they’ll be prepared to deal with this.”
Because of the unprecedented nature of the pandemic, he said, airlines don’t have historic norms to help inform their forecasting.
“They can’t go back to the 1918 flu pandemic,” he said.
Air travel has plummeted compared with the same time a year ago, and airlines have slashed routes in response. Carriers have also introduced measures to make travelers feel safer, such as requiring crew and passengers to wear masks, highlighting enhanced cleaning and sanitation processes, and blocking off middle seats to keep people farther apart on planes. Frontier this week said it would guarantee an open middle seat for a charge, prompting a backlash on social media. Most airlines have also introduced more-flexible policies around changing or canceling flights.
Some figures show that travel at least appears to be clawing back from the lows reached in April as many states start to gradually reopen and ease stay-home orders. According to the Transportation Security
Administration, more than 130,000 people went through airport checkpoints Monday. That’s down from 2.1 million a year earlier, but higher than the daily numbers for most of last month.
And according to hospitality research firm STR, hotels in the United States were more than 28% full April 28-May 4. That’s still a huge drop from a year earlier, but higher than the previous few weeks. And the company noted that weekend hotel occupancy in areas that have eased some restrictions suggests some travelers are eager to get back to vacations.