Volaris discovers good and bad from Mexico’s looser travel restrictions

The recovery has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride for even industry outperformers like Volaris, which is seeing its March and April capacity spike after falling significantly at the end of last year and the beginning of this year. Volaris benefits from Mexico’s fairly loose pandemic restrictions. The country has had few barriers for domestic travel, and its beach resorts for the most part have remained open for international visitors. But Mexico has grappled with severe Covid-19 outbreaks and has not vaccinated as large a percentage of its population as the US has. Volaris’ bread-and-butter leisure, and visiting friends and relatives traffic has held up. In fact, the airline plans to operate 110% of its 2019 capacity in the second quarter. Part of this is responding to demand, and part is a function of its growing fleet, which at the end of the first quarter stood at 87 Airbus A320-family aircraft. But Q1 was bumpy. January and February, historically a weak period for the airline, were even weaker as Mexico and the US struggled with new waves of the diseases, affecting both leisure domestic travel and southbound beach traffic, Executive VP Holger Blankenstein said during the company’s Q1 2021 earnings call. January capacity was 97% of 2020, but capacity fell to 75% in February, before springing back to 93% in March.<br/>