Skift Take
Travel companies owe a lot to Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson. The acceleration of vaccine distribution jolted the U.S. travel industry out of its winter travel slump and built major strength heading into warmer months. Check out the numbers in just the last five days.
After a year of multiple coronavirus case surges in the U.S. dealing blows to the travel industry, the recovery across a variety of sectors like hotels and airlines appears to have something new: momentum.
Just look at the last five days.
The hotel sector added 40,000 jobs in March, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. Hotel occupancy rates in the U.S. are just shy of 60 percent, according to this week's STR report out on Thursday. This is up from drops during the winter surge of new cases and even occupancy rates generally hovering at or below 50 percent during last year’s summer travel peaks.
Nearly 1.6 million people went through airport security checkpoints Thursday. The figure has been above the 1 million-person threshold all week, according to the Transportation Security Administration. While this is still off the more than 2 million daily passengers seen in 2019, it is a major step up from the 124,000 seen last April 1. United Airlines said Thursday it would hire 300 new pilots, a sign of a faster-than-expected recovery. The airline plans to recruit from pilots who either had scheduled training or conditional job offers in 2020 that were later pulled due to the pandemic.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also issued guidelines Friday giving the green light for fully vaccinated Americans to travel. About 56 million Americans, or 17
