As the markets and economists brace for economic downturn, Delta Air Lines Inc. CEO Ed Bastian says he's not concerned about a global recession given the demand the airline industry is seeing.
"There's no recession going on in the air travel business," Bastian told guests at the Detroit Economic Club meeting on Friday. "If anything, there's more demand than (we) can possibly handle. What you're seeing is a big shift coming out of COVID."
The industry is coming off a busy Labor Day weekend when the Transportation Security Administration screened 8.76 million travelers between Friday, Sept. 2 and Monday, Sept. 5, exceeding pre-pandemic 2019 levels, according to TSA.
Delta, which uses the Detroit Metropolitan Airport as a hub, has seen a 59% year-over-year increase in passengers boarding flights there through July, according to data from the Wayne County Airport Authority.
"We love Detroit," Bastian said. "We love the fact that we're your hometown airline and we're going to stay your hometown airline and just make it better and better."
Bastian expects the demand to remain strong for the holiday season and so does Hopper, a fare-tracker firm, which says more than half of Americans plan to travel for one or both of the holidays this year.
Pricing is expected to remain high. Hopper expects ticket prices around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays will be the highest they've been in the last five years.
Pricing has been higher than Delta wants to see, Bastian said.
Hopper expects most travelers will pay $350 a ticket on a domestic Thanksgiving flight and international flights will average $795. As of this month, Christmas domestic airfares were averaging $463 per ticket and international tickets were up to $1,300 apiece.
Hopper recommends that consumers expecting to travel for the holidays book by the week of Oct. 10 and to be flexible on travel dates.
As for business travel, Bastian doesn't expect it to return to what it was before the pandemic since business is done differently today, but he said it's about 80% restored.
Since the start of last year, Delta has hired 20,000 people to keep up with demand, Bastian said, but there have still been reliability issues. The company is still hiring flight attendants, pilots and mechanics, and getting "hundreds of thousands of applicants" for some positions.
