The number of Aer Lingus flights to the US has bounced back to numbers last seen before the coronavirus pandemic, the Irish airline said this week.
The International Airlines Group (IAG)-owned carrier's 473 flights to the US this month topped the 470 it operated in November 2019 and amounted to a 236% increase on same month last year, when pandemic-related travel curbs limited the number of flights to 141. In November 2020 only 90 Aer Lingus flights landed in the US.
This week’s Thanksgiving holiday in the US has been key to the revived traffic, the airline said, with nine more routes and 90,000 extra seats available compared to last year, when options were limited to flights from Dublin to Boston, Chicago, Newark, New York JFK, Orlando and Washington.
Aer Lingus has since revived routes into Miami, San Francisco and Seattle, with departures now available again from Shannon, in Ireland’s southwest, and from Manchester in the UK, from where Aer Lingus first flew to the US in December last year.
Dublin-headquarted Aer Lingus said last month it was “really pleased with the performance” of its transatlantic flights from Manchester, which it said were aimed at providing “high-quality service, direct, non-stop business and leisure travel options at competitive prices” in the north of England.
The number of US destination options offered by Aer Lingus looks set to keep rising as it lines up a mid-2023 revival of flights to Hartford, Connecticut, by which time it aims to have opened a route into Cincinnati.
However whether the post-lockdown travel revival can be sustained could depend on whether the rising inflation seen across most Western economies can be reined in.
Despite IAG returning to profit earlier this year and the Group seeing demand for travel as "strong", Chief Executive Officer Luis Gallego said last month he was “conscious of the uncertainties in the economic outlook and the ongoing pressures on households”.