While the coronavirus crisis has effectively crippled the aviation sector for the time being, the long-term effect on the industry once the regulations begin to ease still remains relatively unclear.
On this episode of Australian Aviation, your hosts Phil Tarrant, Christian “Boo” Boucousis and senior writer Adam Thorn delve into Virgin’s public fight for survival and stories of industry resilience and initiative in working around current restrictions.
They also get philosophical about the implications of the rapid shift to a remote workforce on domestic and international travel in the wake of COVID-19.
Stephen
says:The other issue of concern is the effect on travel budgets.
Businesses with interstate and international operations and business will no doubt be currently transferring travel budget to IT software and hardware to facilitate better and secure environments to communicate internally and externally. That IT spend (and any necessary ongoing licensing and support costs) will presumably put a large dent in future travel budgets – especially where the ensuing months of training and working with virtual meeting systems will challenge the future need, cost and benefit of face to face meetings (and transit, accommodation and other associated costs) and the “lost” time in commuting. I don’t think any airline, especially Qantas and Virgin, can afford to assume that high value business travel will bounce back to any level near previous highs.