Page 9 - BusinessWest June 9, 2021

well underway.”
Elaborating, he said it’s difficult to proj-
ect where the airport will be by the end of the summer in terms of those passenger-volume numbers, but he believes that, if current trends continue (and most all signs point toward that eventuality), then Bradley might be down only about 25% from pre-pandemic levels — a big number, to be sure, but a vast improvement over the past 14 months.
Overall, a number of factors will determine when and to what extent Bradley fully recovers
asked, adding that there has to be a “reckoning” within the business community as to where
it’s going with some of its pandemic-related policies.
The former is Salt Lake City-based Breeze Airways, the fifth airline startup founded by David Neeleman, which will launch non-stop flights out of Bradley this summer, including Charleston, Columbus, Norfolk, and Pitts- burgh. The latter is Sun Country Airlines, which
all it has lost to the pandemic, including everything from busi- ness travel to international flights.
Let’s start with the former, which, by Dillon’s estimates, accounts for roughly half the travel in and out of Bradley.
While some business travel has returned, the numbers are still way down from before the pandemic, he said, adding that the next several months could be critical when it comes to the
“If you still have people telecommuting for COVID purposes, what does that say to the employee about required business travel?”
Dillon said there are two types of business travel. One involves businesses traveling to see customers, a tradition
he expects will return
once COVID-related
fears subside. The other
is inter-company travel,
where a business sends
an employee from one
of its locations to a dif-
ferent one. It’s this kind
of travel that seems most
imperiled, if that’s the proper word, by telecon- ferencing, Zoom, and other forms of technol- ogy, and it’s this mode that will likely lag behind the other.
As for international flights, these, too, will be among the last aspects of the airport’s business to return to something approaching pre-COVID conditions, said Dillon, noting that Air Canada is severely limited by severe restrictions on travel to that country. Meanwhile, Aer Lingus, which initiated flights out of Bradley in 2016, is still ramping up after restrictions on overseas flights were lifted in the fall of 2020. Nothing has been confirmed, but he is anticipating a return of that carrier in the spring of 2022.
Meanwhile, getting back to those signs of life — and progress — that Dillon noted, some new additions to the list were added late last month in the form of two new carriers. Actually, one is new, the other is an existing freight and charter carrier expanding into passenger service.
“As we look toward the summer, we are expecting a very healthy summer travel period.”
will be expanding its footprint at the airport with the introduction of passenger service to Minneapolis.
Dillon noted that several of those new desti- nations, and especially Charleston and Norfolk, are primarily leisure-travel spots, meaning they could get off to solid starts as Americans look to make up for lost time when it comes to getting away from it all.
Looking at the big picture, Dillon said deci- sions in Connecticut and Massachusetts to move up their ‘reopening’ dates and accelerate the return to a ‘new normal’ will only help Brad- ley gain altitude as it continues to climb back from what has been a dismal 14 months since the pandemic struck. u
—George O’Brien
question of when, and to what extent, business travel comes back.
He expects the numbers to start to improve once businesses set their own internal policies for when employees can return to the office and resume many of the patterns that saw whole- sale changes after COVID-19 arrived in March 2020.
“If you still have people telecommuting for COVID purposes, what does that say to the employee about required business travel?” he
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FEATURE
JUNE 9, 2021 9
BusinessWest