New boss of SAS airline: It will take years for demand to fully recover

SAS said it was seeing some signs of recovery in air travel as it reported a narrowing quarterly loss, but its new CEO warned it would take years for demand to return to pre-pandemic levels. The airline, part-owned by the governments of Sweden and Denmark, said it had been encouraged by a gradual increase in demand during the summer holiday season as vaccination drives gathered pace around the world. Yet CE Anko van der Werff said that while he expected continued demand for leisure flights, the shape of business travel was more uncertain. “September, October and November are really strong corporate months typically. Now it’s Sept. 1 and people are booking very late, very close to departure so we just have to wait and see a bit longer,” he said. He declined to give a specific prediction for when overall demand might fully recover from the COVID-19 crisis, though added: “2022 will be better than 2021, but it is in my view going to take years before you are back to 2019 levels.” That was a far more pessimistic outlook than SAS gave in December, when it said it expected demand in 2022 to reach levels “at least comparable” to those before the pandemic. The CEO was speaking after his airline reported losses before tax of 1.36b Swedish crowns ($157m) in its fiscal Q3 running from May through July, versus a 2.08b loss in the same period a year earlier.<br/>