Airlines saw a big spike in online searches and ticket bookings for international travel — particularly from Europe and Latin America — after the administration announced its plans to ease the travel restrictions in September.
American Airlines said bookings over the three days after the announcement were up 66 percent for flights between Britain and the United States, 40 percent for those from Europe and 74 percent for Brazil, compared to a similar period a week earlier. United Airlines said that it sold more tickets for trans-Atlantic flights in the days after the announcement than during a similar period in 2019, a first since the pandemic began.
Delta Air Lines said that many of its international flights on Monday were fully booked. The carrier’s first flight into the United States under the looser restrictions, DL106, is expected to arrive from São Paulo, Brazil, at 9:35 a.m. on Monday, in Atlanta. By the end of Monday, Delta expects to fly 139 mostly full planes from 38 countries into the U.S.
Hotels across the country, particularly those in cities, also felt the impact of the reopening announcement, with increased bookings and interest over the holiday season. Hyatt, the hotel group, said that approximately 50 percent of its bookings by international travelers to the U.S. for the week of Nov. 8 came after the date was announced in mid-October, with travelers flocking to top cities.
The chef Daniel Boulud, who owns several restaurants in New York City, said that customers from overseas had already started to call for reservations or to go on a waiting list.
He added that while his restaurants were already “quite busy,” buoyed by domestic tourism and a trickle of international visitors, “the faucet was not open for tourism yet.” International tourists, he said, will bring necessary foot traffic, in particular to his restaurants near the Theater District.
“It’s been emotional torture to be so far away from my girl at a time when she has needed me the most,” she said in an interview. “We need to make up for lost time.”
While demand is up, the changes have not had a major immediate effect on the number of scheduled international flights. In the first week under the relaxed rules, airlines will operate an average 1,390 daily flights into the United States, up just 35 daily flights from the week before, according to figures from Cirium, an aviation data provider. The data does not, however, indicate how many seats have been sold per flight and the number of daily flights is expected to rise again, by 40, in the second week after reopening.
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