How Will Airlines Recover From the Turbulent Summer of 2021?
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Here's your Money Briefing for Wednesday, September 15th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. So how was your summer vacation?
What caused the widespread flight disruptions during the summer of 2021?
If it involved flying, you might have spent some of your off time waiting in an airport or on hold waiting for answers about airline schedules for what seemed like days.
When things went wrong, they really went wrong. If you got canceled by Spirit, it might be several days before you were going to get to your destination. And that was true at all airlines.
So what are airlines doing to fix the things that caused delays and cancellations all summer? And what's the outlook for airfares this fall? We'll ask WSJ Middle Sea columnist Scott McCartney after the break.
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For airlines, the summer of 2021 was unlike any other. After American summer vacations were effectively canceled by lockdowns last year, airlines went into high gear to meet pent-up passenger demand this year. WSJ Middle Sea columnist Scott McCartney has been tracking their progress and what it means for passengers going forward. And he joins me now. Scott, thanks for coming on the show.
Good to be with you, JR.
So, Scott, the summer of 2021 was supposed to be the airline's grand return to the world stage. How'd they do?
They stumbled and bumbled. They didn't do well. It was a really rough summer for travelers. A lot of delays, a lot of cancellations, a lot of people stranded at airports, just painful all around.
Were the number of delayed flights and canceled flights unusually high?
It was for particular airlines. Some airlines did very well. So, you know, in some cases that balanced out. Delta had a very low rate of cancellations. Even for Delta in the last several years has been very good. But American Airlines canceled 11 times as many flights as Delta did. And American's rate wasn't as bad as some others. Southwest really had a high cancellation rate. Spirit had a complete meltdown in August where they canceled 2,000 flights in one week. And so there were some airlines with very high cancellation rates.
Which airlines experienced the highest cancellation rates and why?
Just as an example, if an airline cancels 1% of its flights, that's pretty typical. And in Spirit's case, they canceled almost 6% of their flights. So it gives you an idea of how different it was this summer.
Now, what were some of the reasons for all the cancellations and delays?
Well, many reasons. Airlines blame staffing situations that in many cases caught them by surprise. In some cases, it was their own pilots and flight attendants not wanting to come back from leave as quickly as the airline thought they were going to come back. So they ran into shortages. They ran into problems retraining crews so that they were good to go back out working. And that tripped up some airlines and led to cancellations. But the labor issues were much broader, as we've seen in other industries. It can be agents at the airport. It may be wheelchair pushers. It may be people to drive the fueling truck or the catering truck. There were those kinds of shortages that happened at the airport, not in the air, and forced airlines to really trim back schedules.
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