Delta posts $5.4b Q3 loss as pandemic hammers travel

The summer travel season was even worse than expected for Delta, which said Tuesday that it lost $5.4b in Q3 as people hunkered down at home during the pandemic. Delta officials pushed back their timetable for breaking even, from year-end to next spring, as their previous expectation that COVID-19 would be contained proved too rosy. The airline's shares fell almost 3% on Tuesday. However, Delta's executives said passengers are starting to return and bookings for Thanksgiving and Christmas are looking up. “It's slow, but it's steady — week by week, they are coming back,” CEO Ed Bastian said of passengers. Bastian said Delta plans to stop blocking middle seats in the first half of next year. That would reverse a policy that Delta has used to distinguish itself during the pandemic from its closest peers, American Airlines and United Airlines, who do not block seats. The number of people screened at US airports is down 65% this month, compared with last October, but that's better than the 68% decline in September, the 71% drop in August and the 96% plunge in mid-April. Most of the people flying now are low-fare leisure travellers. Bastian said business travel is down 85% but that most corporate customers are putting at least a few employees back in the air. Bastian said video technology might replace some trips, and there could be a 10% to 20% drop "in the next couple of years when we get to that new normal of business travel.” Some analysts found that troubling. “Business travel was 50% of their revenue at one point,” said Peter McNally, an analyst at Third Bridge Group in New York. “It’s a market that Delta has made the core of their business, so they will be forced to compete harder on the leisure side of the market to make up for that loss.”<br/>