During today's press briefing, trade organization International Air Transport Association (IATA) posited that eliminating middle seats aboard flights would be detrimental to airlines' attempts at recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and could cause airfares to shoot up by 43 to 54 percent.
According to Forbes, IATA's Chief Economist, Brian Pearce, warned that permanently requiring such social-distancing measures would force carriers to raise current pricing substantially or risk being put out of business. "Without the ability to pass on those costs in higher fares, many operations are going to really struggle to be financially viable," Pearce said.
If regulations were to require that middle seats be left vacant, average load factors would fall below 62 percent, causing the majority of airlines to lose money, IATA's data shows. Out of 122 airlines sampled in its study, only four could manage to break even at load factors under 62 percent. Under such conditions, it argued, air carriers would need to hike fares by as much as 54 percent merely to break even, in a scenario that assumed zero profitability.
Due to seating configurations, the impact would be magnified on wide-body aircraft, so some airlines might attempt to optimize operations by using more narrow-body planes to make lower fares more commercially viable, but even that strategy wouldn't necessarily help carriers to recoup losses.
IATA purported that air-travel demand will be slow to re-start once bans on movement are lifted, due to lack of consumer confidence and lower discretionary income in the wake of economic paralysis caused by pandemic lockdowns. Initially, IATA argued, low-fare offerings may help reawaken passenger demand as they have historically done, but a post-pandemic climate remains uncharted territory. Such lowered pricing won't be sustainable long-term, especially if the market suffers a second shock with an assumed spike in coronavirus cases once travel restrictions begin lifting.
IATA further speculated that 2019 passenger volumes may not be seen again until as far off as 2025 and that, in the interim, a number of airlines are likely to fail and we may inevitably expect airfare prices to rise.
IATA's medical advisor, Dr. David Powell, argued that there isn't sufficient evidence of in-flight viral transmission to justify mandating the elimination of middle seats. This type of attempt at distancing, he pointed out, only places an additional 34 inches or so between passengers-far less than the six-foot social distancing guidelines that apply on the ground. "Nobody has demonstrated", said Powell, that leaving the middle seat empty reduces the likelihood of transmission.
"We all know that the virus has been a passenger on our passengers and that has been the way, for the most part, that it has spread around the world, but that is a different question from how it might have spread between passengers in-flight," he said. Thorough and frequent cabin sanitization, HEPA air filtration and requiring passengers to wear masks in-flight, plus parallel airport health-and-safety measures, are likely more beneficial than seat separation, he said.
IATA said that it is working with the World Health Organization (WHO), International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Airports Council International (ACI) and other stakeholders to come up with viable solutions to these unprecedented challenges being created by the pandemic.
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