Flight anxiety has taken off, and sales are crashing.
Since the year started, there’s been a string of deadly collisions and scary incidents — and Americans’ confidence in air travel has diminished, prompting some flyers to back off on travel plans, according to two airlines that had crashes.
On Tuesday morning, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian admitted that the travel pullback airlines are already seeing this year is likely due to the fatal American Airlines collision in January as well as the non-fatal crash where a Delta flight flipped upside down while landing in Toronto in February.
“It caused a lot of shock among consumers,” he said at a JPMorgan Chase investors conference, per CNN.
“We saw a pretty immediate stall in both corporate travel and bookings,” he added. “Consumer confidence and certainty in air travel started to wane a little bit as questions of safety came in.”
Because these incidents were some of the worst in the past 25 years, “there’s a whole generation of people traveling these days that didn’t realize these things can happen,” Bastian explained.
Bastian did not reveal just how much ticket sales have slowed, but Delta added that on top of the “casual facts” of crashes and worries about safety, the unreliability of the economy and a drop in consumer confidence are also playing a role in lowering demand.
American Airlines CEO Robert Isom echoed Bastian’s explanations, saying that “economic uncertainty is a big deal” and the crash was also a big component in driving down revenue.
But Isom said that the airline’s focus now is “solely to take care of the families of those victims.”