Alaska Airlines sees big rebound in tech business travel

Tech companies are making a big return to business travel, with Alaska Airlines and others reporting a significant uptick in corporate bookings in recent weeks. “There’s just been this material, as in a 50-point change, in booking levels for some of these big [tech] guys in the last few weeks,” Alaska Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Harrison said during the airline’s first-quarter earnings call on April 21. He did not name names but given Alaska’s headquarters in Seattle and hub in San Francisco, these companies likely include industry heavyweights like Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft. The return of these corporate flyers is very good news for the industry. The business travel recovery as a whole has lagged behind leisure flyers, who have come back in droves since the summer of 2020. But although holidaygoers and those visiting friends and relatives have helped fill aircraft, they have done so at lower fares than are typically paid by road warriors. This has made the return of corporate travel one of the biggest watched items for airlines, and the return the big tech firms a significant hurdle for carriers like Alaska and United, which rely heavily on demand in the major tech hubs. Roughly 70% of 2019 corporate demand has returned, Alaska CEO Ben Minicucci said. This compares with the already fully recovered leisure segment at the airline. And Harrison said the return of business travelers helped drive yield improvements in the first quarter, when they rose to up 9% in March compared with three years earlier from an average of up 3.5% across the entire three-month period. Alaska’s new codeshare with American Airlines and membership in the Oneworld alliance have “opened up a lot of doors” for new corporate customers, said Harrison. However, he could not say how much this benefitted Alaska in Q1, and said he anticipated a clearer view by the September quarter. <br/>