PASSPORT
Travel into Story by Noah Wright | Photos by Kassandra Eller | Design by Emma Stark
As Miley Cyrus sings in “Party in the U.S.A.,” “I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and my cardigan.” Or at least that’s how the song goes, right? At the beginning of the year, the travel industry saw some major developments and nine months later, there continues to be changes. So before going off to book those vacation flights to the land of fame excess, there are some important things to know about traveling in our current climate. The travel and hospitality industry has many different outlets that feed into it. So far, the two main industries that are seeing the most change and trouble are airlines and hotels.
Airlines “In March and April of 2020, there was a 95% percent drop in booking; most of the travel currently has been leisure travel: family flights and tourism,” says Louis Smilanich, managing director of ramp services for United Airlines at Newark International Airport. 2020 was a rough year for everyone, but airlines especially felt the strain of COVID-19 because nobody was flying. Even today, airlines are still struggling to bring in their main sources of revenue. “Business travel has only had a marginal return, late to mid-2022 and early 2023 is when business travel is expected to return to the levels it was in 2019,” Smilanich says. “Domestic travel has rebounded really well because, for the most part, there aren’t very many restrictions.” According to Smilanich, some states, like California and New York, implemented contact tracing, but for the most part there wasn’t much. As a result, leisure travel around the United States is doing very well and many of the places that were tourism hotspots are seeing increased visitation again. The same cannot be said about leisure travel out of the country. “Internationally there are a lot of requirements placed on airlines and every country is extremely different,” Smilanich says. If a person were to try and travel internationally, there are many different hoops that they would have to jump through in order to safely travel to their destination according to Smilanich.
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Many, if not all, countries have some sort of testing protocol and Smilanich explains that this could be difficult for travelers that plan to go through many different countries. “When traveling through different countries you not only have to know what the specific requirements are for each country you are visiting, but in some circumstances time can be an issue, because you might need a negative test at the time of boarding and it can’t be more than 72 hours old by the time you land at your destination,” Smilanich says. The hoops and restrictions aside, leisure travel is growing right now. However, Smilanich explains that leisure travel alone is not enough to support the airline industry. “It really changes the revenue models for companies and puts a strain on the profit margin,” Smilanich says. Airlines are broken into segments, Smilanich explains. There are full-service airlines, like Delta, American and United. There are also low-cost airlines, like Southwest. And then there are ultra-low-cost airlines, such as Spirit, Allegiance and Frontier. Currently, everyone is going after those low-cost flights that make up leisure travel. “Instead of having your corporate travel that brings in a good amount of revenue, airlines are attracting and going after the flights that they wouldn’t normally go after,” Smilanich says. “Everyone is targeting those customers that only really care about price and not necessarily service level.”
