With CDC relaxing norms and a robust vaccination drive on, U.S. Airlines have big hopes from the summer holidays, after the worst ever summer travel last year.
Now, Southwest Airlines is planning to bring back all of its cabin crews, who were voluntarily absent on job, at company's urge. This shows, how confident the airline is about the summer.
The Dallas-based carrier, which confirmed of bringing back 209 pilots, said Thursday that it will bring back 2,700 flight attendants on June 1st, just as the summer flying season starts.
“The intended flight attendant recall, as with the recent pilot recall, is to position Southwest for planned flight increases in the summer schedule,” said Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish in a statement. “The flight increases are based upon the improvements in leisure travel demand that the airline recently reported.”
A busy summer schedule is awaiting after a devastating 2020, in which the COVID-19 pandemic caused aircrafts to fly nearly empty and resulted in more than $35 billion losses in the country.
Carriers have said to have seen a surge in new ticket purchases as COVID-19 cases dropped starting in January and vaccine distribution ramped up.
Southwest Airlines has more than 111,000 flights scheduled for June, only slightly less than it had in June 2019 before the pandemic upended the travel industry, according to flight schedule data tracker Diio by Cirium.
Southwest isn’t the one, United Airlines and JetBlue said they would resume hiring pilots, and American Airlines said it will bring back the final 3,200 furloughed flight attendants.
Last year, Southwest Airlines begged flight attendants and other employees to take a voluntary leave from work of up to 18 months, and Employees who took the time off were given 50% pay and full health benefits to cut the costs.
Southwest's leave program was as recently as January, even with the 209 pilots coming back in June, the airline still has 850 pilots on voluntary leave.
