Many industries were affected by COVID. But some experienced far more challenges than others, and few places experienced more economic hardship than domestic and international air travel.
For months, most planes were either shut down or were unable to find enough passengers to fly. Many countries cut off air travel altogether, and many travelers avoided airlines depending on case rates and illness. Layoffs were common, and hiring for new positions was almost non-existent.
What Does the Future Look Like for Airlines?
Instinctually, we know that airlines would eventually recover. But the extent of the recovery was unknown. Using Rover, we decided to take a look at what the recovery looked like from a recruitment perspective, and see what that might say about the present and future of air travel.
Plotting the lines from 2020 to 2021 against each other, we can see that the vast majority of 2020 was, to put it lightly, “not great” for airliners and those under their employ. Even prior to March, travel jobs were never in that high of demand, but that demand slowed further throughout most of 2020 until a slight uptick in December.
Early 2021 was not much better. But, right around the time that vaccines started to enter the picture and case rates decreased, job openings for travel jobs started to increase at a dramatic rate. Almost every month from March 2021 forward saw at least 2 to 3x the number of job postings as compared to the previous year, beating even the pre-pandemic months of 2020.
By November of 2021, demand for travel jobs in Australia was an incredible 12x as high as job openings the previous year and December, while not quite at 12x levels, was still far higher than 2020’s December uptick.
This visualisation clearly illustrates that air travel is back in high demand, as airlines start hiring back their lost employees and trying to make sure they are fully staffed for the rise in desire for both business and holiday flights.
We won’t be able to know if this hiring trend is sustainable (there will be a limit to the number of job openings that airliners are looking to fill before their teams are back to normal), but if you wanted any evidence that the air travel market is back, this chart makes it clear that Australia’s domestic and international travel is back on track.
For more information on how Rover can help you find these data and more, schedule a time to talk to one of our team members.
