Air travel returns to pre-pandemic levels

Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss travel demand following Sunday’s record-breaking 2.56 million air travelers.

Video transcript

JULIE HYMAN: [INAUDIBLE] bouncing back to its highest level since 2019. Over 2 and 1/2 million people took flight yesterday. This comes as Frontier is hitting some turbulence after announcing it has transitioned to strictly digital communication.

So we got two separate things there. On the one hand, travel's back to where it was, which is not a surprise to us, right? We've been talking to a lot of different travel executives. But then speaking of cutting down to the bone, our friends at Frontier saying, you cannot talk on the phone to a live person any longer.

BRIAN SOZZI: I got to drop our man, Barry Biffle. I mean, he's been on with us a lot, and asked him about this because this makes-- I get it from a cost saving perspective, but this is just a terrible move. You want to get blown up for Twitter for doing something wrong? This will probably be it. Imagine trying to call about a canceled flight or trying to get a refund. You're talking to a machine.

BRAD SMITH: Right, and a machine who does not understand, especially if you're just forcing people to engage with chat bots, in what is already a frustrating experience, if you get a canceled flight or delayed flight, going into the holiday period, too, now, what this means for travelers who are going to see increased delays, that's just a byproduct of what we see during holiday travel. And then you would have to--

BRIAN SOZZI: This isn't going to last.

JULIE HYMAN: At the same time, when you call these airlines--

[BUZZER]

--you're on hold for hours and hours and hours. So that's the alternative, I guess.