Airlines surge as AAL boosts summer domestic flights

Airline stocks are climbing on Thursday as American Airlines boosted its domestic flights for the summer. Yahoo Finance's Kristin Myers and Emily McCormick discuss.

Video Transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: But Emily, I also want to ask you about American airlines because they're actually increasing domestic flights this summer, which surprises me, considering how few people are traveling right now.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Well, some reaches that we're actually seeing here from just the data that we've gotten in May, Kristin, particularly for American. We saw American put out some stats today, saying that daily passengers averaged just around 32,000 per day in April but grew to more than 110,000 by the last week of May, so clearly starting to see a boost in demand here. And that's what we're seeing reflected now in their updated July schedule.

So American airlines said it now plans to fly 55% of its domestic schedule for July versus the same month last year. And that's up from May when it was flying just about 20% of its schedule from 2019. We're also seeing a boost now for the schedule in July over 2019 on the international side as well.

So starting to see that boost in demand. It echoes what we've gotten in the TSA numbers as well, seeing the number of daily traveler through-point data on the upswing from April to May. And we're not out of the woods yet, of course. You know, we're still down significantly year on year basis. But looking at month on month, at least we're starting to see that travel demand starting to tick up. And taking a look now at American airlines stock, that is up 38%. So market participants definitely loving at least the new updates we're getting from airlines today. Kristin?

KRISTIN MYERS: All right, thanks so much, Emily McCormick.