Mar 07, 2025

It seems clear that airlines are seeing a decline in traffic that originates elsewhere and flies to the United States. The question is how much traffic.

None of the three global U.S. airlines would respond to questions on the topic on Thursday. Two said to wait until Tuesday, when top airline executives will speak at the JP Morgan industrials conference.

Do tariff talk and inching away from European alliances discourage discretionary leisure traffic from Canada and Mexico and Europe to the United States?

Last month, three airlines provided various levels of indications that this is the case.

“What we have seen though, since the tariff announcements, is that our sales from Canada into the U.S. have actually dropped very significantly,” Alexis von Hoensbroech, CEO of Calgary-based WestJet, said on Feb. 13.

Bookings to the U.S. had dropped by about 25%, von Hoensbroech said as the carrier announced a deal with Lufthansa Technik to build an aircraft repair and testing facility in Calgary, according to Canada’s CTV News.

“I’m personally very disappointed by the way things are going. I think that a trade war is the very last thing this country, this continent, this world needs,” he said. “But we will always adjust to what’s happening and take it from there.”

Secondly, Air Canada said on its Feb. 14 earnings call that it would pro-actively reduce capacity to some U.S. leisure destinations, the Toronto-based Financial Post reported.

“We do have redeployment opportunity, if required, in sun markets, where you see a lot of demand interest right now, and the booking curve is much closer than we have seen the last couple years, and there could be an opportunity for us in some domestic Canadian leisure markets as well,” said Mark Galardo, Air Canada’s executive vice-president for revenue and network planning, the newspaper said.

Neither Air Canada or WestJet responded to emails on Thursday.

A third, more subtle indication of the possible diminution of Europe-origination travel to the U.S. came during a Barclays investor conference on March 20, when United CFO Mike Leskinen hinted at the topic.

“International business is great right now,” Leskinen said, before noting that “80% of our business internationally is U.S. point of origin. So the strong dollar is good.”

Leskinen also said that 2% of United business is government-related and “We have seen some slowing in government sales.”

No analysts asked questions about Europe origination traffic or the falloff in government sales. United has a hub at Dulles International Airport while American has a hub at National.

Airline shares were stock market favorites in early February. At the close on Feb. 7, Frontier shares were up 29%, with Alaska shares up 17%, Delta up 15%, United up 14%, and American up 1%. Southwest shares were down 7% and JetBlue was down 11%.

As of Thursday’s close, airline shares were all down.

American shares were down 22%, JetBlue was down 18%, United was down 10% and Delta was down 7%. The mainly domestic carriers were generally doing better: Frontier was down 7% and Alaska was down 6%.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedreed/2025/03/07/airline-traffic-to-us-from-elsewhere-may-drop-check-back-on-tuesday