A report released by Skyscanner on the 22nd shows that the international aviation market has recently revealed new features: more and more passengers delay booking their tickets at the “last moment before leaving” to avoid the loss of canceling or changing the tickets. Also, one-way tickets are more popular than round-trip tickets, and domestic routes are more popular than international routes.
According to the survey, countries are continually adjusting border control and quarantine rules, which means that people’s travel plans may be disturbed. They had to cancel or change tickets, revise travel routes, or even give up travel.
Skyscanner is a platform that provides consumers with ticket price comparison and booking services of various airlines. Hugh Aitken, an executive at the company, told Reuters that the number of visits to the website has decreased by 60%-70% in recent months due to the global pandemic.
Consumers worldwide tend to prefer one-way tickets to round-trip tickets when buying tickets recently, because of the fear that a sudden lockdown might happen.
Besides, the frequency of searching for domestic destinations is significantly higher than that of foreign destinations. Market observers believe that this is due to people’s concern that the schedule will be disrupted and even forced to stay abroad in consideration of border control and quarantine measures for 14 days. However, after the relief of related restrictions in many countries, overseas tickets’ searches had increased.
Not only were passengers changing the ways of traveling, but airlines worldwide have taken some measures. For example, transforming passenger planes into cargo planes and launching a new type of tourism project of “flights to nowhere”, which have created some buzz and increased some revenue.