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New U.S. spending data suggests that some brands, such as Enterprise, Vrbo, and JetBlue, had a better first half of 2021 than their rivals. The travel industry as a whole should be grateful for the U.S. federal stimulus checks to consumers.
The pandemic restrictions that defined the U.S. travel sector during the pandemic are easing. Still, some travel brands are benefiting sooner than others — with federal stimulus checks helping to juice the rebound.
A case in point is United Airlines, which said in a filing on Tuesday that leisure fares for summer travel have surpassed 2019 levels on tickets issued since May. Leisure flight bookings thrived. United saw a higher average revenue generated from passengers — measured by the number of revenue passenger miles flown — versus the comparable period in 2019.
Across travel brands, U.S. spending and survey data in April showed a rebound in consumers' willingness to book travel as the government sent its third and largest round of stimulus payments of the crisis.
For those who did get stimulus checks, travel spending increased 105 percent between the low in January to the peak in March, according to spending and survey data from market-research firm Cardify.
Cardify studied data from about 200,000 consumers who use mobile rewards platform Drop. The stimulus analysis was done using its anonymized credit and debit data by identifying a st
