Fewer passengers, higher fares (good Indy article)

[CaptainCriticalAngle]

This makes v interesting reading. But grim reading for all pilots, including wannabes I'm afraid.

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/flight-shaming-sustainability-environment-iata-airlines-a9091236.html

[covec]

This makes v interesting reading. But grim reading for all pilots, including wannabes I'm afraid.

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/flight-shaming-sustainability-environment-iata-airlines-a9091236.html


Daily Telegraph (UK News) reporting similar.

Quote. “Air fares could double when lockdown is lifted, making foreign holidays temporarily unaffordable for many British families.

The Telegraph understands ticket prices are set to surge because once non-essential foreign travel is once again allowed, aircraft carriers are likely to be barred from fully filling planes.

This is in order to ensure passengers keep a safe distance from each other while onboard. Last night an industry source said it is expected that aircraft carriers will be given social distancing guidance, which they will be asked to enforce for passengers“.

Unquote.

Must admit, having now given up on sitting in Row 0 (but I do have an FI job courtesy MOD) I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to use public transport infrastructure. E.g. London Underground to Heathrow. Then the Security. Security Trays. The crush of people. Retail outlets. Public toilets. The queue at the entrance to the aircraft as you board. Flying packed economy. I’m sure that the Cabin Crew must feel the same and, I assume Pilots if they too travel on public transport to Crew In.

Time to get used to masks and gloves. Lovely. All the way across the pond.

[AirportPlanner1]

Airport fees would have to rise too which will feed through. Many terminals rely on volume feeding the retail/food outlets which brings in lucrative rent and income which sustains the place. Same for car parking etc. If you’ve got only a third of the passengers, it doesn’t take long for the shutters to come down. Equally you lose economies of scale in handling etc, all of a sudden staff for 150 pax becomes staff for 50 pax

[Clandestino]

Uh-huh, and we'll have to maintain this new "social distancing" on trains, coaches, buses, subways, etc. trebling the fares and giving every PPRuNeing city & country in the world insufficient pax transport capacity.

Do you still think that only airlines are going down the drain?

[MCDU2]

This is the new brexit. Lots of hypothetical talk about what could or couldn't happen in the future. Just filling column inches for the sake of it.

[JanetFlight]

Welll...the CNN experts says precisely the opposite...prices will be the most low and cheapest ones since 2001, and a lot of bookings are now being made starting next July onwards....

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/future-travel-bookings-pandemic/index.html

[MathFox]

In the US airlines do fly near empty planes to qualify for emergency subsidies, so every dollar of revenue is welcome.

In the EU near all planes are grounded (employees on emergency unemployment benefits) and selling tickets could mean that planes have to be flown, with all associated costs.

[PAXboy]

No one knows where this will end up. Each carrier will try their own formula and watch others. A bit like dealing with the virus now ...

[Saintsman]

There are an awful lot of hotels and resorts around the world. There are hundreds and thousands of people who rely on tourism for their livelihoods, so they are not just going to give up. Holidays will have to become cheap in order to attract visitors. If it is cheap, the demand will be there. Airlines will not get away with charging high prices, because if they do, the likes of Ryanair will certainly undercut them.

As for holidaying in the UK, the weather is still unreliable. Once your two weeks have been ruined by rain, you won’t make that mistake again.

[HZ123]

Much fighting talk on how transport and the travel trade might deal in the future with pricing. Surely one of the most pertinent issues are how many people will be in a position to finance holidays and travel after restrictions are lifted? I fear vast numbers of people will not be able to finance either. I can see an immediate take up from those who will not be financially penalised but that will be short and sweet. I agree with the Saintsman remarking on UK holidays but having taken a few in the last couple of years, UK hotels are expensive as is eating out. Weekends away on Locos' all on the credit card as used to happen is a long way off!

[navstar1]

Welll...the CNN experts says precisely the opposite...prices will be the most low and cheapest ones since 2001, and a lot of bookings are now being made starting next July onwards....

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/future-travel-bookings-pandemic/index.html
You would be a very brave person to book flights at the moment however cheap they might appear. Which airlines will still be with us later this year ? Will they still cancel flights to suit themselves ? What will their refund policy be? If their policy is the same as now, and I fully understand the reasons quoted by industry experts and IATA and the fact that you might be entitled to a refund ,I suspect you will finish up with a worthless piece of paper called a flight credit with many restrictions. However good the deals they seem to be offering they are not that good!

[PAXboy]

EasyJet plans to keep the middle seat on its planes empty to allow for social distancing once the Covid-19 lockdown has been lifted.

EasyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren expects the seating measure will encourage more people to fly. "That is something that we will do because I think that is something that the customers would like to see," he said. "Then we will work out with the authorities and listen to the customers' views and points on what they believe is the right thing to do, particularly in the start-up period."

BBC Web News (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52306868)

[SpringHeeledJack]

Looked at in simple terms, if the prices are too high and the airlines shrink too much due to lack of passengers (all possible) then too many interested parties with too much (multi-billions) invested will lose out. Someway and somehow, perhaps with you and I paying for it through taxes, the massive investments will be protected for the most part. Money will be printed out of thin air and things will continue.

If not, then it's aluminium for everyone, holidays in Bognor Regis and private jets for those with their wealth still intact. ;-)

[Bob Viking]

I have a quick question for those in the know.

I am a military pilot but actually fly commercially on a regular basis so my vested interest is purely as a consumer.

Once international flights start up again (any ideas as to when that might be?!) what do you think airlines will do with regard to ticket prices?

A. Charge a fortune to make up for lost revenue and the fact that they may have to leave some seats empty.

B. Charge peanuts in order to tempt people back into their empty aircraft.

C. Stick with what they were roughly before the crisis and build their finances back up slowly.

D. Wildly fluctuate based on demand for any given flight.

Each of these scenarios has benefits and drawbacks and are obviously very simplified but with your best guesses (and some justification if possible) what do you think will happen?

BV

[Paul Lupp]

As far as I am concerned, it's too early to contemplate what may happen. Some airports may close, some airlines may close.... how much will travel insurance cost and will it cover viral infection treatments?

I certainly would not fly from UK to USA without travel insurance in case I was taken ill whilst visiting. There are plenty of questions that need to be answered before many of us will even begin to think about travelling out of our own country

[crewmeal]

No chance of losing APD then? That subject seems to have died.

[Paul Lupp]

No chance of losing APD then? That subject seems to have died.
UK only or world-wide?
It's always struck me that APD is grossly unfair (but then a lot of taxation is). We only had APD introduced in the UK comparatively recently and it didn't take long for it to rapidly become one of the most expensive APD's world-wide.

If you're flying into a country to go spend money there, why then further tax someone for so doing?

In my mind, a bit like high car park charges in UK town centres - councils should be doing all they can to attract people in to spend money in shops, not adding a further charge to discourage them - although this is currently academic due to lockdown (but my local borough council has abolished all charges on the main town centre car park and removed the barriers to permit those who do need to go to the town centre to do so without the added burden of car park charges - alternatively it may be because they can then furlough the car park attendants and save money).

[PAXboy]

APD arrived because the Brits, like most nations, do not like Income Tax. They have made it clear across 40+ years that anyone promising to increase taxes will not get elected. So Indirect Taxation has become the game. Brits now pay a tax on insuring their car as well as insuring their car, etcetera.

At LHR they changed their pricing system from a 'size of aircraft' to 'how many seats on an aircraft'. Everyone tries to slice the cucumber into thinner slices so as to make it 'dissappear'. Sometimes, a passenger collectes several slices on one journey - sometimes they don't.

Do not expect indirect taxation to change any time soon. Unless you vote to put up direct taxes and VAT.

[Paul Lupp]

^
Ah..... somewhere I have a list of all the new taxes introduced in the UK over the past 20 years or so. I can remember when our standard rate of VAT was 8% (more usually,10%) instead of the now, quite frankly, extortionate 20% and also when I first started working, I recall that National Insurance was around 4% whereas now it is double or more - and you can't avoid paying unless on a very low income, so it is effectively part of income tax. Taking that into account, the total percentage of income tax plus NI is now about the same in percentage terms as it was around 40 years ago, yet other taxes are much higher (eg VAT which replaced our old Purchase Tax), and we also have APD if we fly, tax on gas, electricity, telephone bills, insurance premiums etc etc - yet despite a rising population we have worse government-provided services.

Anyway I didn't want to change the subject to taxation in the UK.... these are truly tragic times for so many and will only widen the gap between the rich and the not-rich. It's not just aircrew who will be affected - airlines, airports, the entire travel/leisure industry, hospitality (hotels/restaurants) and many others will be significantly affected or wiped out. Heck, I can't even get my hair cut in a barbers any more, and home visits by hair care professionals are also banned.... can't even go and see elderly frail mum 20 miles away as that is also banned :-(

Never in a million years did I dream that Boris would take our freedom away from us and cause so much suffering to so many millions of people

[Asturias56]

Taxation was defined years ago at getting the maximum milk for the minimum moo

Govts love VAT type taxes - they're really cheap to collect and the evasion is very low as it's in everyone's interest (except the last man in the chain) - to account for it

As with the UK and everywhere else now knows you get what you pay for - and all we can expect are for all taxes to rise to pay for the CV-19 crisis and the more robust health care systems people will want down the road. APD is just another revenue tax - occasionally it's dressed up as a "green" tax but really it's not. A green tax would be to tax aviation fuel at the same rates as petrol & diesel for other vehicles - and that would REALLY impact airlines

[Asturias56]

"Never in a million years did I dream that Boris would take our freedom away from us and cause so much suffering to so many millions of people" - I'd guess he was/is trying to stop your elderly frail old mum from finishing up on a stretcher in a corridor in a hospital where the care system that has collapsed as happened in N Italy with no chance of treatment....................

[PAXboy]

Indeed. The lock down is not about individuals but the collective health of all. My work now involves me with the UK funeral trade. You do not want to know about the back log in funeral premises, shortage of coffins and more.

As Sir David Spiegelhalter OBE FRS [a British statistician and Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge who specialises in medical matters] discussed on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago: If the virus was allowed to just let rip, it would be expected to kill some 600,000 people. That is almost the number of deaths in the UK in a typical year. No one wants to see a whole extra year's worth of deaths occur in the space of a few months. Hence lock down.

[InSeat19c]

^
Never in a million years did I dream that Boris would take our freedom away from us and cause so much suffering to so many millions of people

Do you think he did it just to be awkward?

What do you think he should be doing instead?

No one is enjoying it, least of all the people fighting for their lives in hospital.

[S.o.S.]

During this remarkable time, my colleagues and I have allowed some threads to have a broader range of views than normal. However, there are plenty of threads for specific opinions about CV19. So let's narrow this one back down again a bit.

I certainly welcome any direct experience that folks have of 'paxing' at the moment - from anywhere in the world for domestic or international - but the future is all guesswork.

[SpringHeeledJack]

I read an article a couple of days back about Hong Kong airport testing a new cabin, rather like a large telephone box/smoker's cabin where the passenger walks in and within the closed atmosphere is sanitised of all external bacteria and virus'. This doesn't seem to have any effect on internal maladies, but by wearing a mask the passenger would be 'clean' for the pre-flight and flight segments of travel..This, or similar might make the risk lower and therefore allow somewhat normal seating configurations on aircraft and so on