Lagging Business Traffic Slowing Recovery

Lagging Business Traffic is slowing the recovery of the US airline industry in early 2022, as business travelers have not yet returned to the skies in anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. Having learned to cope by using desktop videoconferencing applications during the pandemic, many corporation find it less expensive to utilize this technology to maintain existing relationships, enabling them to avoid travel expense and fight inflationary pressures due to supply chain disruptions.

Several airline executives have indicated that they are not expecting a full recovery in lagging business traffic to pre-pandemic levels until 2024 at the earliest. That means that we will likely continue to see a gap between pre-pandemic traffic levels in 2019 through February 2020 and today’s traffic levels, that are not quite there yet. The following chart, which illustrates 2019 in blue, 2020 in orange, and 2022 in red shows that traffic has still not recovered to prior levels, but appears to be following a similar seasonal pattern.