Certainly one of the most recent hurdles potentially facing the airline industry: tech layoffs.
Virgin Atlantic’s chief executive, Shai Weiss, told FOX Business that the multitude of layoffs within the sector – each throughout the US and the UK – “has an impact” on the travel industry.
“The changes within the tech world, which we’re, in fact, exposed to… these are big travelers across the Atlantic and beyond,” Weiss said.
For example, the chief executive noted how the nearly 40-year-old carrier – owned by billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and Delta Air Lines – flies to San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas, which “are high conurbation areas for technology corporations.”
“Once they make decisions to reduce their workforce it’s going to impact the travel industry more broadly,” Weiss, who took over in 2019, continued.
Still, the chief executive’s expectation that corporate travelers will return in full scope by 12 months’s end hasn’t wavered.
In recent months, tech layoffs have proliferated as corporations try to tighten their belts after over-hiring in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The businesses benefited from a surge in demand for his or her services when people were forced to work remotely.
There have already been tens of hundreds of job losses from heavy hitters including Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, Twitter, Facebook parent Meta, Microsoft, Dell, Zoom and Salesforce.
Greater than 101,000 global tech employees have already lost their job nearly six weeks into the brand new 12 months, in keeping with Layoffs.fyi, a web site that tracks job cuts within the industry.
Despite the cuts, many tech corporations are larger than they were three years ago. In August, when Snap cut 20% of its staff, the social media company said even after the layoffs, its staff shall be larger than it was a 12 months prior. Its workforce had grown to greater than 5,600 employees in recent times.
Tech can be only one piece of the company audience.
Weiss is expecting corporate travel to return to pre-pandemic levels by the top of 2023. Already, corporate travel has recovered at 80% of 2019 levels across the long-haul carrier’s entire network.
Within the meantime, Virgin Atlantic is seeing a hefty surge in leisure travel, with record bookings in the primary month of the brand new 12 months alone, illustrating how travelers proceed to search out experiences, Weiss said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.