I still stand by my comments from when all of this started. International travel will not actually recover at all. By the time countries allow it, and with the restrictions that it will have, there simply will not be any airlines left standing.
I agree that a year or so of massive restrictions on international air travel is going to cause massive changes.
And yes every airline could well fold (I suspect some propped up by Government ownership, or funding, and or particular Royal Families may survive) , there will equally be companies just waiting to start up new airlines by gaining access to assets at fire-sale prices.
But how these new airlines will operate, and the number of flights etc my crystal ball is unable to predict. But one can speculate and I suspect the news will mainly be grim for the leisure traveller. Less flights, higher fares and FF programs if still surviving at all only a shadow of what they recently were.
Air travel as we have known it in recent years may vanish for many years. Certainly the era that we have enjoyed as pointy end travellers at very little cost using FF points is going to be radically effected for the worst and perhaps may never return, or at least not for many a year.
I think that passenger international travel has doubled over the last decade worldwide. The next 12-18 months will be a tiny fraction of that. And the period after that will still be a lot less.
The new airlines that will emerge are most likely going to more along the lines of stripped down budget ones. But I doubt that initially that budget prices will be charged for tickets.
Having had planes and flight crews all stood aside in the main fora year or more is going to make harder to get things going again. One should not just expect a switch to be flicked with a massive number of flights to be resumed. More likely will be incremental recommencement staying low for some time.
On the demand side one would imagine that less people will want to travel internationally fora while.
On the traveller infrastructure side the tourist and travel infrastructure will have gone into mothballs too, and if say it is 12 to 18 months away that will be also be slow process to reactivate.
Air freight will remain. But who knows at what tonnage. And with less passenger planes that have carried some freight that will see changes in how air freight is done.
Domestic flights in Australia I see as starting to resume very soon, and to NZ not after that. This may allow Qantas to hang on, and to then allow it to eventually resume some international flights. Virgin will have a new owner.
("except for maybe NZ")
