More than 4,400 flights were cancelled worldwide on Sunday
Jan. 2, according to flight tracking website Flight Aware, dashing pre-holiday
hopes for smooth travel going into 2022. With the Covid-19 omicron variant now
bearing down hard in the eastern United States and throughout Europe, more than
2,700 cancellations affected flights into, within or out of the U.S. yesterday.

The cancellation miseries began in earnest on Christmas Eve.
Globally, airlines cancelled more than 6,000 flights over the Christmas holiday
weekend—Friday, Saturday and Sunday—with more than 1,700 into, within or out of
the U.S. But midweek cancellations continued, with airlines cancelling 1,082
flights into, within or out of the U.S. on Wednesday, Dec. 29 and 1,125 on Thursday,
Dec. 30.

While omicron was not the only factor contributing to
cancellations—there were weather issues as well—staff shortages due to omicron
infections and the requisite 10-day isolation period in place leading up to the
intensive holiday season were the primary problem, according to the airlines.

“The nationwide spike in omicron cases this week has
had a direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our
operation,” United Airlines offered in a statement on Christmas Eve.

JetBlue issued a similar statement: “Like many
businesses and organizations, we have seen an increasing number of sick calls
from omicron.”

Airlines bulked up staffing with new employees
prior to the holidays and wooed existing employees to work through the holiday season or take extra
hours with increased pay. The strategy worked for some carriers—both Southwest and American Airlines came through with few cancellations—but not all.

JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes penned a letter to the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, Dec. 22 asking for the agency
to consider a reduced quarantine period for vaccinated individuals. His letter
joined that of Delta
CEO Ed Bastion, who sent a similar letter the day prior. Both cited
vaccinations, treatment options and more reliable testing that would enable
infected employees to return to work more quickly with the reduction of the
transmission window.

The CDC has bowed to this request from airlines and other
sectors, but it did not come fast enough to prevent JetBlue from canceling
flights further into January. The airline has cut 1,280 flights from Dec. 30 to
Jan. 13, citing the omicron-induced staffing shortage affecting its largely Northeast-based
crew members, where the variant has surged in the U.S.

Cowen analyst Helane Becker told
Fortune that the new CDC guidelines should mitigate the issue, especially
if the omicron surge peaks in the first weeks of January and then subsides, as
some models and health experts predict it will.

“We expect [cancellations] to last into next week and
then once we are past peak the issues should abate,” Becker told Fortune on
Dec. 30.

What About Business Travel?

If past is prelude, the fast-moving omicron variant will
disrupt business travel in a number of ways. Companies themselves could place new
restrictions on travel. A Global Business Travel Association survey
fielded in early December, prior to the height of the U.S. omicron, surge asked
travel managers about the willingness of their companies to continue to permit
nonessential travel. Just 17 percent said their companies had restrictions in
place, but 19 percent said their companies were considering them.

Unlike past surveys, GBTA’s most recent did not ask about
how the variant would affect employee “willingness” to travel. With new
information about increased transmission associated with omicron coupled with
the travel uncertainty wrought by airline staff shortages, short-term demand from
would-be business travelers is likely to take a hit.

Indeed, U.S. airfare payment processor and data firm ARC
reported corporate airline ticket sales down sequentially nearly 20 percent
week over week, for the week ending December 26. Numbers dropped from 52
percent off 2019 sales to 62 percent off the 2019 benchmark. That compares to
only 24 percent off 2019 sales for the week ending Dec. 5, which was prior to the
omicron variant taking hold in the U.S.

According to the GBTA survey, 37 percent of travel suppliers
and intermediaries said their bookings had tracked an omicron-induced slide.

In-person meetings and events have already taken a major hit
from omicron. GBTA itself postponed its December conference in Berlin due to concerns
about the variant and fast-changing regulations in Europe around public
gatherings.

Major global conventions and forums are also pulling the
plug, for now. The World Economic Forum, scheduled for January in Davos,
Switzerland, has been postponed to summer. JPMorgan Chase & Co. has pushed
its annual health care conference, also planned for January, to a virtual platform
after Moderna and Amgen dropped participation. Amazon, Google, Meta (formerly Facebook),
Mercedes, GM, Intel T-Mobile, Twitter and others have either pulled their
participation from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas or gone to a
fully virtual presence. The dropouts prompted the event, which starts this week,
to slice a day off its schedule.

High-profile moves like these not only eliminate
the travel associated with the events, they may have a chilling effect on other
event, with business decision-makers looking at them for best-practice guidance.
The chill may also trickle down to transient business travel—either through
company restrictions or the preferences of individual employees. The latter will
continue to hold sway with companies during the pandemic as tight labor conditions
affect more than just airlines and travel suppliers.