Travelore News: Delta Extending Expiring Travel Vouchers From Pandemic

Delta Air Lines said Wednesday it will extend through 2023 the window for customers to rebook credits earned when they purchased but then canceled flights during the pandemic.

Before the announcement, Delta flight credits were set to expire at the end of 2022. The new date will also apply to all tickets bought in 2022. Customers will be able to use the credits throughout 2024 if the trip is booked by Dec. 31, 2023, the airline said.

The move was not immediately matched by American Airlines or United Airlines, where credits are set to expire March 31 and Dec. 31, respectively.

Passengers are entitled to refunds under federal law if the airline cancels their flight. But if the passenger cancels, airlines generally provide only some form of credit or voucher, typically with a one-year expiration.

Refunds have become a major source of airline consumer complaints to the U.S. Transportation Department. Congress is considering legislation that would require airlines to cover lodging, meals and other costs that consumers incur when airlines cancel their flight.

Travelore News: American Airlines Will Drop Flights To 15 Cities In October

American Airlines will drop flights to 15 smaller U.S. cities in October when a federal requirement to serve those communities ends.

The airline blamed low demand during the coronavirus pandemic, which has triggered a massive slump in air travel and huge losses for the carriers. Airlines and their labor unions are seeking billions in new taxpayer relief.

American said its schedule covering Oct. 7 through Nov. 3 will drop flights to cities including Sioux City, Iowa; New Haven, Connecticut; and Springfield, Illinois.

“This is the first step as American continues to evaluate its network and plans for additional schedule changes in the coming weeks,” the airline said in a prepared statement.

More than half of the cities that American is dropping have no other airline service. It will be a major blow to Tweed-New Haven Airport, but the airport’s executive director, Sean Scanlon, held out hope that the loss will be temporary.

“I’m confident that we will see other carriers here once the industry bounces back from COVID regardless of what happens with American,” Scanlon said.

A massive pandemic-relief measure approved in March set aside up to $50 billion in cash and low-interest loans for the nation’s passenger airlines. American was the largest recipient — $10.7 billion if a pending loan wins final approval from the U.S. Treasury Department.

In return for taxpayer dollars, airlines were barred from furloughing workers and were required, in most cases, to continue serving destinations they had before the pandemic. Both of those conditions expire Sept. 30.

Passenger airlines and their labor unions are lobbying for an additional $25 billion to keep paying workers and avoid furloughs through next March. Cargo airlines and contractors would get $7 billion.

The push by airlines and labor has received significant support in Washington. A majority of the Democratic-controlled House endorsed the additional money, so did 16 Senate Republicans. President Donald Trump spoke favorably about helping the airlines when asked about the proposal.

However, the provision is wrapped up in discussions over a larger virus-relief package that would include extended unemployment benefits and, Democrats hope, aid to cities and state governments. The fate of that measure is unclear after negotiations between congressional Democrats and the White House broke down more than a week ago.

An American Airlines executive cited the stalemate in Washington for the airline’s decision to cut service to some destinations.

“We have been holding off, hoping that we would come to some sort of agreement that would extend (the payroll money) and would extend the service requirement. That broader negotiation does seem to be stalled, and this is an unfortunate casualty of that,” said the executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity to explain private discussions about the decision.

Without more federal money, airlines may lay off or furlough tens of thousands of workers as early as Oct. 1. American has warned 25,000 workers they could lose their jobs. United Airlines has sent notices covering 36,000 employees. The final number of cuts will depend on how many employees take offers of buyouts, early retirement or long-term leave.

The requirement to preserve most routes that airlines flew before the pandemic has been unpopular with airlines because many of them carry few passengers. The Transportation Department agreed to let airlines drop a few cities if other carriers continued flying there, but many other requests were denied.

American Airlines lost more than $2 billion in its most recent quarter.

Other airlines declined to comment on their plans.

Industry analysts believe American did not simply ax cities with the fewest flights or seats. The airline likely considered other factors, such as competition and important customers, they said.

“It’s a network planner’s nightmare to pull out of a city,” said Jim Ogden, a product director at aviation data firm Cirium and a former network planner for American. “When you close down a city, you’re cutting those customers off to your entire network.”

American could continue to serve the smaller cities in a limited capacity, through flights at nearby airports or by selling tickets to flights operated there by another carrier, a practice called code-sharing.

Other cities that American dropped from the October schedule are Del Rio, Texas; Dubuque, Iowa; Florence, South Carolina; Greenville, North Carolina; Huntington, West Virginia; Joplin, Missouri; Kalamazoo-Battle Creek, Michigan; Lake Charles, Louisiana; New Windsor, New York; Roswell, New Mexico; Stillwater, Oklahoma; and Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

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Dave Collins in Hartford, Connecticut, contributed to this report.

David Koenig can be reached at www.twitter.com/airlinewriter

Virus Pandemic Reshaping Air Travel As Carriers Struggle

Melaku Gebermariam uses an electrostatic sprayer to disinfect the inside of a Delta Airplane between flights on July 22, at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Va. U.S. airlines have scrambled to reassure travelers that planes are safe. They require passengers to wear face masks and are cleaning cabins more thoroughly, even spraying seats with anti-microbial mist. (AP Photo/Nathan Ellgren)

In a bid to survive, airlines are desperately trying to convince a wary public that measures like mandatory face masks and hospital-grade air filters make sitting in a plane safer than many other indoor settings during the coronavirus pandemic.

It isn’t working.

Surveys indicate that instead of growing comfortable with air travel, more people are becoming skeptical about it. In the United States, airline bookings have stalled in the past month after slowly rising — a reaction to a new surge of reported virus infections.

Globally, air travel is down more than 85% from a year ago, according to industry figures.

The implications for the airline industry are grave. Several leading carriers already have filed for bankruptcy protection, and if the hoped-for recovery is delayed much longer, the list will grow.

The four largest U.S. airlines lost a combined $10 billion from April through June. Their CEOs say they will survive, but they have lowered their expectations for a rebound.

“We were all hoping that by the fall the virus might run its course,” said Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly. “Obviously, that has proven to be dead wrong.”

When Consumer Reports surveyed more than 1,000 people in June about their comfort with various activities during the pandemic, 70% said flying was very or somewhat unsafe. They rated going to a hospital emergency room or standing in line to vote as safer.

In a survey commissioned by an airline trade group, the biggest concern of travelers was the possibility of sitting next to an infected person.

John Kontak, a schoolteacher from Phoenix, said that was his fear as soon as he stepped onto a crowded American Airlines flight this summer to visit his parents in Ohio.

“I don’t know anything about this person who is sitting a foot away from me,” Kontak said. “They took the bottom line or the dollar over the safety of passengers. Next time, I’d rather drive back to Ohio than fly — it’s safer because I can control it.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says sitting within 6 feet (2 meters) of other passengers, often for hours, may increase the risk of getting COVID-19. But CDC also notes that most viruses and other germs don’t spread easily on flights because of how air circulates on planes.

Standard & Poor’s said this week that the industry’s prospects have gone “from bad to worse,” with global air traffic dropping by up to 70% this year. In May, S&P said a 55% drop was a worst-case scenario.

“It’s going to be a slower and more uneven recovery than one might have expected,” S&P analyst Philip Baggaley said.

An airline trade group, the International Air Transport Association, predicts carriers will lose $84 billion this year, making it the worst year in the industry’s history. The group says traffic won’t fully recover until 2024.

Full Coverage: Virus Outbreak

Asia, where outbreaks were brought under control earlier, is doing better than the U.S. and Europe. Domestic travel inside China has recovered to about two-thirds its year-ago level. In the U.S., traffic is less than one-third of 2019 levels.

Air traffic at Europe’s more than 500 airports has tumbled, down 94% in June compared with the same month last year. There were about 4 million passengers, compared with 217 million a year earlier.

Travel ticked up when more than two dozen European countries opened borders to one another in early July, but virus cases are rising in several countries, leading to reimposed restrictions. This week, the U.K. imposed a 14-day quarantine requirement on travelers — even Britons returning home — from France and the Netherlands. Travel from outside Europe, including the United States, is still restricted.

In the United States, traffic picked up after collapsing by 95% in April but has stalled — down 74% in July, 72% in August.

Airlines came into this crisis in the best shape ever financially, thanks to rising demand for travel, reduced competition through mergers, and billions raised by extra fees.

Among international carriers, the big state-backed airlines are almost certain to survive. In Asia and the Middle East, they are often seen as vital contributors to the overall economy. Similarly, big European carriers including Lufthansa, Air France-KLM and British Airways may be too important to let fail.

It’s too late for U.K.-based Flybe; it shut down in March. Latin America’s two biggest airlines, Avianca and Latam, filed for bankruptcy protection. So did Aeromexico. Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Australia, both part of British mogul Richard Branson’s galaxy of companies, are using the courts to reset debts.

In the U.S., Trans States and Compass, which flew smaller planes for the major airlines, and Alaska-based Ravn Air shut down, but the big airlines have survived with billions in government aid and billions more in private borrowing.

U.S. airlines have scrambled to reassure travelers that planes are safe. They require passengers to wear face masks and are cleaning cabins more thoroughly, even spraying seats with anti-microbial mist.

“You can smell the cleaning fog that’s been done, and everything is wiped down basically top to bottom – chairs, window shades, even the light switches and overhead bins,” said Jason Bounds, a veteran flight attendant at Delta Air Lines.

The airlines split in one regard. Delta, Southwest, JetBlue and Alaska leave some seats empty to create room between passengers. United, American and Spirit do not, arguing that social distancing is impossible on a plane.

Most flights have plenty of empty seats, but scenes of full planes alarm travelers.

Carol Braddick, a business coach and consultant who splits her time between Phoenix and England, was so worried about the American Airlines leg of her journey to the U.K. that she sought out a COVID-19 test after arriving.

“The person I was sitting next to was drinking nonstop, shouting to his friend a row behind him; they were shouting back and forth,” Braddick said. “The combination of alcohol, shouting and no mask is unacceptable, and the flight attendant did nothing.”

Braddick put off plans for a couple of short holiday trips within Europe this summer.

“The new reality for us is fewer trips, longer stays, and being much more selective about which airline we’ll fly,” she said.

Even frequent flyers like Seth Miller, who writes about travel at his PaxEx.aero website, are grounding themselves.

“Much as I love and miss travel, it just doesn’t seem worth the risk to me,” he said.

By DAVID KOENIG and DAVID McHUGH___

Nathan Ellgren in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

___

David Koenig can be reached at www.twitter.com/airlinewriter.

@TraveloreReport on Twitter

Travelore Opinion: The Odds Of Catching Covid On A Flight Are Slim

Planes have not been the sites of superspreading events, at least so far.

Tray tables up.

 

Photographer: Andrew Matthews/PA Images

If you decide to fly, the odds that you will pick up Covid-19 are low, according to one expert analysis. Despite the known dangers of crowded, enclosed spaces, planes have not been the sites of so-called superspreading events, at least so far.

That’s not to say flying is perfectly safe — safety is relative and subjective. But as restrictions continue to change, the only way to move forward through this long pandemic is to start thinking in terms of risk-benefit ratios. Very little is without risk, but perhaps some risks — such as flying — are small enough to warrant taking.

Arnold Barnett, a professor of management science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been trying to quantify the odds of catching Covid-19 from flying. He’s factored in a bunch of variables, including the odds of being seated near someone in the infectious stage of the disease, and the odds that the protection of masks (now required on most flights) will fail. He’s accounted for the way air is constantly renewed in airplane cabins, which experts say makes it very unlikely you’ll contract the disease from people who aren’t in your immediate vicinity — your row, or, to a lesser extent, the person across the aisle, the people ahead of you or the people behind you.

What Barnett came up with was that we have about a 1/4300 chance of getting Covid-19 on a full 2-hour flight — that is, about 1 in 4300 passengers will pick up the virus, on average. The odds of getting the virus are about half that, 1/7700, if airlines leave the middle seat empty. He’s posted his results as a not-yet-peer-reviewed preprint.

The odds of dying of a case contracted in flight, he found, are even lower — between 1 in 400,000 and 1 in 600,000 — depending on your age and other risk factors. To put that in perspective, those odds are comparable to the average risk of getting a fatal case in a typical two hours on the ground.

The numbers all sound low enough, though Barnett says they are still high compared to the 1 in 34 million odds your flight will end in a deadly crash. He told me he wouldn’t fly right now because his age, 72, puts him at higher risk than the average American, and he says you have to consider the risk of adding to the problem by getting the virus and unknowingly passing it on to

The Chances Of Getting Covid-19 on a Plane is Slim

Arnold Barnett estimates that you have a 1/4300 chance of picking up the virus on a full, 2-hour flight

Source: Covid-19 Risk Among Airline Passengers, medRxiv, 2020

Other experts have been mixed on whether they, personally, would fly. The Boston Globe recently reported that of 15 epidemiologists and infectious disease experts surveyed, 13 said they would not fly at this time — however it wasn’t clear whether they had any reason to get on a plane.

University of Massachusetts biology professor Erin Bromage says he is flying every week, as he advises federal, state and district courts on how to reopen while minimizing risks. Whereas many experts are taking a zero-tolerance for risk approach, he’s trying to find a middle ground — and helping others do it in a rational way.

Drawing on a background in industrial mechanics and pilot training (an injury forced him to switch career paths into biology), Bromage says that the air exchange system in planes is better than in hospitals, with the air in the cabin being completely replaced 30 times every hour. He agrees with MIT’s Barnett, though, that it’s possible to transmit the disease to or from your close neighbors.

He and Barnett both suggested that customers should, if possible, choose an airline, such as Jet Blue, that promises to keep the middle seat open. That cuts way back on the odds of getting or giving the virus. JetBlue also promises that solo travelers won’t have a neighbor in a two-seat row.

Real-world data bodes well for flying, too. Australia has been using contact tracing to investigate Covid transmission on hundreds of flights, and has found that while infected people got on planes, nobody got infected on a plane. Worldwide, there have been a couple of individual transmissions possibly linked to flights, but no superspreading-type events.

Assuming we’ll be living with this disease for months to come, we will need ways to separate low-risk activities from high-risk ones. Keeping informed of relative risks can help us do that. By worrying less about the relatively safer part of a trip — the actual flight — we can pay more attention to the potentially riskier parts, such as crowds and tightly packed lines at the airport.

Of course, we’re all obligated to avoid adding to the spread of the disease, and this means taking precautions in the air, such as wearing a mask and staying home if sick, and keeping a distance from others at the airport. 

What happens at your destination matters too. Traveling around and mingling with distant contacts can increase the risk of spreading the virus more than mingling with a comparable number of people closer to home. So people can help themselves and others by driving their own cars to the airport and renting cars wherever they arrive, rather than taking taxis or ride-shares.

In the old normal, Bromage would wrap up his advisory duties and have dinner with the people he’s working with. Now, he just goes back to his hotel room. “It’s quite lonely,” he says. Like so much this year, it’s a compromise.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-05/is-it-safe-to-fly-here-are-the-odds-of-catching-covid-on-a-plane

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Faye Flam at fflam1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Nicole Torres at ntorres51@bloomberg.net