• Over the last two months, as the COVID-19 outbreak has exploded around the globe, the airline industry has gone from jovially optimistic about its prospects for 2020, to preparing for a negative financial impact “almost without precedent.”
• Travel demand has plummeted around the world as coronavirus anxiety has led travelers to postpone vacations, corporations to suspend business travel, and major events and conferences — such as SXSW — to be cancelled.
• Airlines have suspended routes, cancelled flights, and taken other cost-cutting measures to try and weather the storm, but the impact is already starting to hurt.
• Moody’s dropped revised its outlook for the business to “negative” for the first time since late-2008, as the global financial crisis was picking up steam.
• We spoke with industry analysts trying to forecast the overall impact of the outbreak.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

In late-January, as the coronavirus outbreak began to pick up steam in China and gain traction in other parts of Asia, analysts began sounding the alarm for the airline industry.

However, the warnings were tempered. While the coronavirus could pose a “substantial” risk to global air travel and the aerospace sector, as an analyst at Canaccord Genuity said, any …continued .
[Source: Business Insider]