NEW YORK—New research suggests that airline travel could be slow to recover from the coronavirus outbreak. A targeted study by Upgraded Points, a travel points and rewards firm, asked questions to airline travelers about the recent global pandemic and their travel plans.

“The airline industry is in a great deal of trouble again,” Upgraded Points founder Alex Miller said in a statement. “They’ve certainly seen their share of difficulty over the years; after 9/11, during the 2008 economic downturn, [and others]. But this is probably the worst crisis the industry has ever faced.”

Overall, the majority of Americans who responded to the survey said their biggest traveling concern was the COVID-19 virus. But the study broke that question down into a variety of other specific concerns to help reveal the nuanced complexities around the topic. When asked what worried them most—contracting the virus personally or passing it on to others—the majority of Americans responded they were most concerned about contracting the virus themselves.
But 32 percent of those asked did express concerns about passing the disease on to others, while still others expressed concern about becoming part of overall community spread.

Read the results of the full survey here.
 
In another survey question, Americans were asked when they plan to begin traveling again, and at which airline ticket price. The answers were arranged based on the choices given: an immediate time frame (the next two weeks), then monthly, all the way into 2021. The overwhelming majority stated they had no plans to travel again until 2021, representing 20 percent of those surveyed.

The study surveyed 1,250 people in the U.S., asking a variety of questions related to their travel plans, concerns around those plans, and asking them to identify what would make them feel most comfortable about traveling again.

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