Business and long-haul air travel is going to come back stronger than many analysts have forecast, according to the head of one of the world’s largest carriers, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby.
Speaking at a CAPA Centre for Aviation online summit, Kirby said: “The leisure and domestic markets are going to be the first to recover.
“But I bet you dollars to doughnuts that in 2023 long-haul international travel is going to be outperforming domestic by a very wide margin. It’s just a timing issue.”
He insisted: “We concluded back in April [2020] that business travel ultimately was going to come back. Almost everyone said that wasn’t going to happen and a lot of people still say it.
“We also reached the conclusion international travel would come back, but it would be slower because borders aren’t going to come down yet.”
Kirby insisted: “Once borders do come down, international travel is going to come back.
“Every other large global carrier in the world retired big chunks of their [long-haul] wide-body fleet. We’re now 5% larger in terms of wide-body fleet than when the pandemic started.
“We did that because we had a different view of what the recovery would look like.”
He told the summit: “I have a view that is not the consensus. Business travel is not transactional. It’s about relationships. Going to an event and socialising with people is where you get to know people. Those are the people you call when you need them.
“This is about human nature instead of technology, and human nature has not changed.”
Kirby argued: “People were having this conversation about the death of business travel 20-25 years ago when video conferencing first started. It was wrong then and it’s wrong [now]. Maybe the technology is a little better, but it’s the same conversation.”
He noted: “I’m fond of saying, the first time someone loses a sale to a competitor who showed up in person is the last time we’ll do a sales call on Zoom.”
Kirby added: “The European market is going to be one of the strongest markets in the world coming out of this because there were players in the Atlantic [market] who have never made money [and] they have gone.”
He also ruled out consolidation among the major carriers, saying: “At the beginning of the crisis, I thought there was going to be consolidation. But we’ve been able to raise so much liquidity, not just through the government but through the private capital markets, that no one has a liquidity issue.
“Everyone is going to survive. I don’t think there will be any major consolidation in the US.”