"Who would have thought six months ago . . . .?
Maybe in six months or a year you will be saying the same thing.
We are geriatrics on a low fixed income but we usually manage to travel a couple of times a year, sometimes three or four with discount fares and companion flights and we were sitting here yesterday wondering where would be available to travel a little later this year. I suspect there are a lot of people out there in similar situation.
I am well aware that it is the last ten percent in many industries that make the difference between profit and loss but I was surprised to read that 'up to twenty percent' of jobs had been lost in the worst hit areas. If you were reading the dire predictions in most news media you would have thought that it was more like eighty percent! Apparently eighty percent of the travelling public will still have money to travel when this is over.
The game changer will probably be a vaccine or a reliable treatment. If we were lucky enough to get both by, say, next Spring, then why would people not travel? As much as business is currently finding ways to communicate with less face to face I expect new markets to develop and take up the slack. They always do.
I suspect it will be structurally more difficult to restart flying than to close it down. The process of scheduling and servicing parked aircraft and the sheer complexity of the industry has to make it a drawn out process but I suspect there will be a lot of pent up demand when we are free to fly abroad again.