Is a recession brewing in row 33?
Airline CEOs this month warned Wall Street that passengers’ appetite for domestic trips is coming in lighter than they had hoped when they set forecasts high at the start of 2025.
On a series of earnings calls, they said the reasons range from President Donald Trump‘s whipsawing tariff policies to volatile markets and, most notably, economic uncertainty.
“Nobody really relishes uncertainty when they’re talking about what they could do on a vacation and spend hard-earned dollars,” American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said on a quarterly earnings call on Thursday.
That means airlines have too many seats on their hands — again. Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines said they will cut back their capacity growth plans after what they still hope to be a strong summer travel season.
Delta, Southwest, Alaska Airlines and American Airlines pulled their 2025 financial outlooks this month, saying the U.S. economy is too tough to predict right now. United Airlines provided two outlooks, one if if the U.S. falls into a recession and said it expects to be profitable in either scenario.
That is leading to cheaper plane tickets. Airfare fell 5.3% in March from last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest data. Easter, a peak travel period that coincides with many school vacations, fell in March of last year, though fares also dropped 4% in February this year.
Adding to pressure, executives said, is slower-than-expected growth from corporate travel, which is facing the same challenges many households are. Government travel plunged, too, amid the Trump administration’s cost cuts and mass layoffs this year.
“If uncertainty pops up, the first thing that goes away is corporate travel,” said Conor Cunningham a travel and transportation analyst at Melius Research .
Delta CEO Ed Bastian said on April 9 that corporate travel was trending up 10% year on year at the start of 2025, but that growth has since flattened.
Business travel is key to major carriers because those customers are less price-sensitive and often book last minute when tickets are likely to be more expensive.
The overhang of seats in the domestic skies is forcing airlines to cut prices to fill their planes.
Alaska Airlines warned Wednesday that weaker-than-expected demand will likely eat into second-quarter earnings. Chief Financial Officer Shane Tackett told CNBC that demand has not plunged, but the carrier has lowered some fares to fill seats.
“The fares aren’t as strong as they were in the fourth quarter of last year and coming into January and first part of February,” Tackett said in an interview Wednesday. “Demand is still quite high for the industry, but it’s just not at the peak that we all anticipated might continue coming out of last year.”
At the front of the plane, executives say demand is holding up far better, while U.S.-based customers are still flying overseas in droves.
But lingering concerns are still weighing on the industry.
“Certainty will restore the economy, and I think it will restore it pretty quickly,” Isom said.