Revenge Travel -- It's A Thing -- A Mild Recession — Munger — June 11, 2023

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Shell: says it's in the oil and gas business, again. Link to The WSJ. 

US rail: CEOs realize their workers are ... important .. offering concessions ... link to The WSJ.

Airlines ... revenge travel: this is very, very interesting.

• link to NPR;

Travel insurance company Allianz Partners analyzed more than 40,000 trip itineraries planned for this summer and concluded that American travel to Europe will jump 600% from last year.

This sharp uptick is not limited to Europe. This month during an industry conference, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said that "demand is off the charts," while the airline industry is struggling to keep up.

• link to Yahoo!Finance: Delta Airlines.

The summer of 2022 proved to be a season of “travel chaos,” but there’s something funny about this year: People just keep hitting the road. Even stubbornly “sticky” inflation and the highest ticket prices in many years aren’t enough to spoil the appeal.

And Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian just revealed to Fortune that demand remains “really, really strong,” to say the least. In fact, as he told Fortune CEO Alan Murray and editor-at-large Michal Lev-Ram on the Leadership Next podcast this week, his team has quantified Americans’ thirst for “revenge travel” right now, and it’s a huge number.

“People talk about revenge travel, or pent-up travel—this is beyond anything that people can classify as truly pent-up,” Bastian said. “We went through several years of people not being able to get back out and travel and experience and see loved ones, see their business colleagues, adventures—all the reasons we travel. And people had a lot of time.”

He revealed that he asked his team to measure the gap between inherent demand for U.S. travel that couldn’t be met over the past three years, based on “any kind” of historical pattern: “That gap is $300 billion—with a B.”

Delta is currently seeing demand it’s never seen before, he continued, “and there’s no end in sight. We’ve had the 20 largest cash sales days in our history all occur this year.”