Aviation and travel industry experts are echoing the message of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, saying that citizens currently abroad who want to come home to wait out the COVID-19 outbreak should make plans immediately.
That’s because – while there should be no problems for Canadians looking to book a flight home from anywhere in the world in the near future – international air travel could be facing something as drastic as an almost complete shutdown in the coming months, whether due to low passenger demands or government regulations for carriers to stop flying.
“We’ve already seen so many things with air travel that we thought we’d never see that, to rule out anything – I think – would be irresponsible,” said Washington, D.C.-based transportation analyst Seth Kaplan. “You can get to a certain point in low demand that airlines just wouldn’t operate; no airline is going to operate at 3% [of capacity]. So you could absolutely envision that.”
Madhu Unnikrishnan, the Bay-Area-based editor of industry publication Airline Weekly, said passengers outside of North America currently will not face a problem finding flights to return – although the availability of direct flights and flexible schedules have been severely curtailed since the novel coronavirus outbreak accelerated its spread locally in the last weeks.
But Unnikrishnan echoed Kaplan’s point that people wanting to return need to make plans now. Many analysts, Unnikrishnan said, compared the current disruptions to international flights to that seen right after the terrorist attacks during 9/11, but added the outbreak – and countries closing their borders to each others’ citizens – is causing challenges happening at a much wider scale.
“This is affecting almost every region in the world and every airline – and it’s for an unknown duration,” he said. "With 9/11, the passenger demand came back in a few months. Here, the passenger demand has all but evaporated, and it’s uncertain when it will come back.”
As such, Unnikrishnan said some tracking has shown recent Europe-North America flights to be severely overbooked, after U.S. President Donald Trump suspended travel from Europe for 30 days for foreign nationals in mid-March. With airlines already cutting capacity up to that point, the shock announcement from the White House led to a massive crowd of U.S. citizens panics-purchasing return tickets en-masse, overwhelming available flights and U.S. airports.
Global Affairs Canada is now offering an emergency loan program to Canadians abroad, where citizens and permanent residents can apply to federal government offices to receive up to $5,000 to help with travel costs and “life-sustaining needs” if stuck outside of Canada without travel options.
The announcement was made on the same day Canada closed its doors to foreign visitors this week - excluding citizens of the United States.
Kaplan said he does not anticipate Canada to receive the same crush of returning travellers as the United States did, since Trudeau was clear that Canadians are allowed to return (provided they are symptom-free from COVID-19), as the bulk of Canadian international air travel under normal situations is still handled by the four airports designated by Trudeau to handling all of Canada’s international flights for the time being. Those airports are Toronto-Pearson, Vancouver, Montreal-Trudeau and Calgary.
