Trade war and leery travelers have airlines trimming flights and withdrawing financial guidance

ENT

Trade war and leery travelers have airlines trimming flights and withdrawing financial guidance

2025-04-25 01:12 Last Updated At：01:21

Major U.S. airlines are reducing their flight schedules and revising or withdrawing their profit outlooks for the year due to less domestic travel demand as sentiment about the national and global economies sours.

American Airlines pulled its financial guidance for 2025 on Thursday, joining rivals Southwest and Delta in declaring the economic outlook too uncertain to provide full-year forecasts. All three airlines cited weakening sales among economy class leisure travelers.

“We came off a strong fourth quarter, saw decent business in January, and really domestic leisure travel fell off considerably as we went into the February time frame,” American Airlines CEO Robert Isom told CNBC.

Consumer reluctance to book vacations would correspond with a new poll that showed many people fear the U.S. is being steered into a recession and that President Donald Trump's broad and haphazardly enforced tariffs will cause prices to rise.

There's also increasing concerns about international travelers. Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan, said in a client note that anti-American sentiment could be spurring a travel dropoff, with data showing that international visitors to the U.S. are running about 5% lower than a year ago.

“In recent weeks there have been numerous news stories about tourists canceling trips to the U.S. in protest of the perceived heavy-handedness of recent trade policies,” he wrote. “This points to potentially another channel to consider in assessing the effects of tariffs on economic activity.”

Some economic indicators point to expectations of a slowdown. Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes slowed in March, and U.S. consumer sentiment plunged in April, the fourth consecutive month of declines. However, fears of a downturn have not translated into layoffs.

Trump announced sweeping tariffs on April 2 that triggered panic in financial markets and generated recession fears, leading consumers and businesses to start pulling back on spending, which includes travel. The president put a partial 90-day hold on the import taxes but increased his already steep tariffs against China.

Beijing increased its import tax on American goods to 125% in retaliation. On Thursday China denied Trump’s assertion that the two sides were involved in active negotiations to end or mitigate their trade war.

American Airlines said it would give an update on its full-year guidance “as the economic outlook becomes clearer.” Airline executives said sales among business travelers and for premium seats on long-haul international flights remained solid.

Southwest Airlines reported late Wednesday that it would trim its flight schedule for the second half of the year due to lower demand. The company also said it could not reaffirm its 2025 and 2026 outlooks for earnings before interest and taxes, given “current macroeconomic uncertainty.”

United Airlines last week gave two different financial forecasts for how it may perform this year, one if there’s a recession and one if not. The airline said it planned to reduce its scheduled domestic flights by 4% starting in July in response to lower-than-expected demand for economy fare tickets.

“We think there is a reasonable chance things can weaken from here,” United CEO Scott Kirby said.

Delta Air Lines, the nation’s most profitable carrier, predicted as recently as January that the company was on track for the best financial year in its history. Earlier this month, the airline scratched its performance expectations for 2025 and said it was putting a planned flight schedule expansion on hold.

“With broad economic uncertainty around global trade, growth has largely stalled,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said at the time. “In this slower-growth environment, we are protecting margins and cash flow by focusing on what we can control. This includes reducing planned capacity growth in the second half of the year.”

The parent companies of Frontier Airlines and Alaska Airlines also pulled their 2025 guidance.

War reaches Ukrainian rock band Ziferblat even at the Eurovision Song Contest

2025-05-16 21:18 Last Updated At：21:20

BASEL, Switzerland (AP) — Ukraine’s musicians can’t escape war, even at the Eurovision Song Contest.

Rock band Ziferblat were in Basel, Switzerland to represent their country when they learned the home of backing singer Khrystyna Starykova in a frontline region of eastern Ukraine had been destroyed by Russian shelling.

“She’s so strong,” said guitarist Valentyn Leshchynskyi, who formed Ziferblat with his vocalist twin brother Daniil and drummer Fedir Khodakov. “She is 19 years old only, but the impact of this situation — I think she won’t give up.

“Of course it’s difficult when you’re losing your flat while you need to stay calm to celebrate here because it’s a musical festival, it’s not about the war.”

The band is set to compete for Ukraine in Saturday’s Eurovision grand final with “Bird of Pray,” a song whose intense vocals and prog rock sound owe something to the 1970s – as does the bell-bottomed pink suit Daniil Leshchynskyi wore in Tuesday’s semi-final.

Valentyn Leshchynskyi said the lyrical message of loss and hope, centered on a phoenix-like bird, resonates with what Ukrainians experienced in recent years.

“We want to build a dream on the stage – even for three minutes, for Ukrainians – like the war will be over in the very near future,” he told The Associated Press.

Ukraine is a longtime Eurovision competitor – as was its neighbor Russia. Both saw their relationship with the continental pop contest transformed by Moscow’s full-scale invasion three years ago.

Russia was kicked out of Eurovision. Ukrainian folk-rap group Kalush Orchestra won the 2022 contest less than three months after the invasion. Winning brought the right to host the contest the following year. When war made that impossible, Liverpool stepped in to stage Eurovision with a distinctly Ukrainian flavor, decking out the English city in blue and yellow Ukrainian flags.

Even before the full-scale invasion, Ukraine used Eurovision for cultural diplomacy, as a way to tell the world about their country’s history, music and language. Ukrainian singer Jamala won the contest in 2016 — two years after Russia illegally seized Crimea — with a song about the expulsion of Crimean Tatars by Stalin in 1944. Kalush Orchestra’s winning song “Stefania” blended rapping in Ukrainian with a haunting refrain on a traditional Ukrainian wind instrument.

Now the message is that Ukraine is still standing, and still fighting.

Daniil admitted to feeling a “little bit of pressure” ahead of Saturday. But he said it was “such a privilege” to represent Ukraine.

“We have two missions here,” his brother Valentyn said. One is to come out at or near the top in Saturday’s 26-nation musical showdown. The other is “to remind Europeans about the war.”

As part of its Eurovision journey, the band is fundraising to buy robotic de-mining systems to help clear an area of Ukraine he says is 3 1/2 times the size of Switzerland.

Ziferblat’s trip to Eurovision coincided with Vyshyvanka Day — the third Thursday in May, when Ukrainians around the world wear traditional embroidered shirts as a symbol of national pride.

The band members joined scores of Ukrainians clad in elaborately stitched vyshyvanka in a Basel park to eat borscht, sing Ukrainian songs and cheer on the band ahead of Saturday’s final.

“This is a day that is gathering all Ukrainians together,” Valentyn said. “In Kyiv, the capital, everyone is wearing these shirts and going to the streets celebrating and you feel like a united nation for one day.”

Associated Press journalist Kwiyeon Ha contributed to this story.