Vaccines + summer = travel. Let's end the week on a high note by looking at the continuing unlockdown.
To get an idea of how many more people are traveling, I compared downloads of the top airline apps so far in 2021 vs. the first half of 2020. The results are almost ad I'd expected.
The most downloaded airline apps in the U.S., by downloads and in order are American, Delta, United, Southwest, and Spirit.
According to our estimates, the top 5 apps were downloaded 7.5M times in the first half of 2020 across the App Store and Google Play. That total rose to 11M in the first half of 2021, an increase of 47% year over year.
Who's winning? This is a great growth rate for an industry that's been choking for so long, but what's interesting here is who saw the most growth.
Spirit Airlines!
Downloads of Spirit Airlines, the lowest-ranked app, rose by 110% year over year. That's the most out of this group, which averaged 50% growth. All except for Southwest Airlines which saw a modest 6% growth.
Regardless of growth rate, the trend is going up. It's not at 2019 levels, where our estimates show this same group saw a little over 13M downloads, but it's considerably closer. Given how things are trending so far, I expect the second half of 2021 to look much closer to 2019 levels.
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