Peter Ingram, CEO of Hawaiian Airlines (HA), bets a lot of coronavirus pandemic weary Americans want a trip to the Aloha State.
"We think we see a lot of indication that there's pent up demand for travel, particularly on the leisure end, which is the core of our business," Ingram told Yahoo Finance Live, citing positive booking trends. "We're feeling a lot better about things right now than we have throughout much of 2020."
Hawaiian Airlines lost $770 million dollars last year as the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the airline industry.
"What we communicated to investors on our last quarterly earnings call is that we expected for this summer for our North America to Hawaii business, which is a little over half of our revenue, that we expected to be up to between 80% and 100% of capacity by summer. We're actually on track to be in that range with our April schedule," Ingram said.
Time to get away
Last month, analysts at Deutsche Bank included Hawaiian among several airlines, Alaska Air (ALK), JetBlue (JBLU), Spirit (SAVE), and SkyWest (SKYW) that are expected to benefit as more Americans fly. The analysts raised their price targets and ratings on the airlines from Hold to Buy.
Ingram said there is still a long road to travel for Hawaiian Airlines to "get back to something that resembles the pre-pandemic normal." But, the airline is adding service to its schedule as COVID-19 vaccination programs accelerate nationwide. Hawaiian just launched new service this week: Long Beach California to Maui and Orlando to Honolulu.
"We're very excited about a year of recovery after a very, very difficult 12 months," Ingram said.
Last week, Hawaiian announced it was delaying plans to lay off 800 people, the vast majority flight attendants, from its workforce which totals at about 7,500. Ingram and his team anticipate the traveling public will feel secure about flying as more Americans get vaccinated.
"I think they are going to say gosh, I haven't had an opportunity to travel for a while and I want to go and do something different and take advantage of having the freedom to be able to do that," he said.
Raymond James analyst Savanthi Syth recently told her clients, "Domestic U.S. trends have improved substantially starting late February."
According to the Transportation Security Administration, a little more than 1 million people, on average, passed each day through the nation's airports between March 7 and March 10. That's up from the numbers in February but less than the 1.8 million people who during the same time period in 2020 passed through airport security as the country began to shut down.
"Bookings have been improving and we see some encouraging results there," Ingram explained. "Our international business is going to take a little longer and that really depends on the pace of vaccine distribution and how the virus progresses in some of the key international markets."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released less restrictive guidelines for vaccinated people to visit others but continues to encourage everyone to delay traveling.
"I would hope that we can remove some of the restrictions, remove quarantine restrictions, remove testing requirements when they're no longer necessary so we're not putting up impediments to travel that are no longer necessary for the situation," Ingram said.
Adam Shapiro is co-anchor of Yahoo Finance Live 3pm to 5pm. Follow him on Twitter @Ajshaps
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