FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - UA's Viability / Financial Future due to the COVID-19 Era [Consolidated]
Old Oct 7, 2020 | 10:36 pm
  #1031  
bocastephen
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Originally Posted by exp
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Saw an airline industry analyst said that business travel will come back. As soon as companies lose out on deals because their competitor flew in for in-person negotiations, people will drop Zoom right away.
This is nonsense - probably some amateur-hour analyst trying to pump airline stocks for their brokerage. I wouldn't make bets based on what a dime-store MBA analyst writes, but rather what people are actually doing. Companies do not want outsiders coming to their offices for in person meetings, let alone employees wanting to travel to another business office. United needs to plan on adapting its business model away from business travel for at least 5-8 years, if not longer. Almost no one is flying international trips for business meetings - you can't even enter most business destinations, or you need a long quarantine, and that is unlikely to change absent a proven, effective vaccine or treatment.

What really should be happening is an amplification of the old low-frequency hub-spoke system where outlying stations sent banks of flights into a hub less frequently, then a larger aircraft would fly a larger number of customers to the next hub or focus city. That might mean 4-5 777 or 787 flights IAH-LAX instead of ~8 737 flights spread through the day. Frequency and capacity need to come way down.
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