"The revenue environment appears to have bottomed out, but we still expect significant headwinds in the rest of 2009,” Delta Chief Executive Richard Anderson recently said in a conference call.
Airlines have seen traffic plunge more than 10% in the recent past as the global recession strained demand for air travel. International and premium-class traffic have fallen the most dramatically as corporations have trimmed travel budgets.
Delta, the world’s largest airline, said Tuesday its portion of seats booked for domestic flights is two to four percent lower for May and June than a year earlier.
But Delta executives said revenue trends are roughly in line with March and April, indicating that demand doesn’t appear to be slackening further. And the company reiterated that it expects travel to increase now and that it will report a profit this year, which would be its first since emerging from bankruptcy two years ago.
