What the summer travel season may look like

Yahoo Finance's Myles Udland, Seana Smith, Dan Roberts and Melody Hahm discuss the latest news out of the major airlines regarding summer flight schedules and what it means for summer travel.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: Let's quickly talk a little bit about some news in the airline space today. American Airlines, that stock is higher, the company announcing that it's increasing its domestic bookings for the summer, its capacity for the summer, by some 74%. Now that's off a low base, right, they basically went down to what amounted to no flying relative to what they do.

But you know, Seana, I think it's an interesting, again, kind of a sentiment check on at least there's enough demand for American to say that we want to nearly double what we expected our summer capacity to be. And again, that doesn't mean 3 million people are coming through TSA checkpoints every day, the way we saw in the before times. But there are people out there who have summer plans who are saying, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and do them.

SEANA SMITH: There are. And I think this also plays into the fact that a lot of these airlines, or at least the ones that are positioned to [? win, ?] are the ones that have the biggest presence here domestically. Because I think we have seen, at least from what the data has shown that we have gotten, is that there has been an uptick, but most of them have been in domestic travel. So American planning to fly 55% of its domestic schedule, obviously a bullish sign here for the company.

But it's interesting to see how the plans vary from airline to airline. Because United [INAUDIBLE] and that they're only flying 25% of their domestic schedule this summer. So it's interesting just to look at the discrepancy between the two.

But I think there are signs. Obviously, we get the TSA data. That has been an uptick. People are returning to airports. People are feeling more comfortable to fly. I think there is still a lot of hesitation out there. We don't know. It's probably going to be quite some time until we get back to the levels that we were at back in 2019, or even in the beginning of the year before the coronavirus outbreak really hit here in the US.

But we've heard from a number of these airline CEOs in the past couple of days. We had the CEO of Delta saying that average flight is actually almost half full. It's almost 50% full. So to him, this signals that there is a need to start adding more flights into the marketplace and add some of those bigger planes to meet the demand that's out there.

So it's a huge step in the right direction. I think people are more willing to travel. But I think it's going to be quite some time, really, until we get back to those pre crisis levels.

MYLES UDLAND: And I would just slightly apologize to our viewers for saying that American stock is up today. It's up 40%. That's an explosion to the upside. Obviously, the stock's down a ton from its highs. It's been more than cut in half. But United shares up 15%, Delta up 13, and American up 40%.