Young, Confident and Flying, Virus Be Damned

For some people, a $50 plane ticket is too good a deal to pass up, even during a pandemic. As people self-quarantine, work from home and generally wall themselves off from the outside world, Joe DeSimone is preparing to travel the globe. In the last few weeks, the 30-year-old game design instructor from Austin, Texas, has booked two flights — to London and Toronto — and has getaways to Nashville and Los Angeles in the works. He’s one of a number of young people who have watched airline ticket prices plunge in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, and have seen it as their golden opportunity to travel.

“The way I see it,” Mr. DeSimone said, “either things will normalize and prices will return to a rate that makes it difficult for me to travel, or the world is going to end and I might as well enjoy it while it lasts. ” Raj Mahal, 32, runs PlanMoreTrips, an online travel planning app he launched in January. For the last month, as the number of coronavirus cases ticked up, activity on his site declined.

But then, nearly overnight, he saw a 20 percent jump in bookings — largely from people flying out of tech hubs like San Francisco, Seattle and New York — to warmer locations like Hawaii, Australia and South America. Curious about the trend, he emailed customers to ask them why they were booking. He learned that many were employees of large tech companies like Uber, Twitter, Amazon and Google, who had been given instructions to work remotely. “A bunch of them were saying, well, the coronavirus is here in my city, so we may as well go somewhere else,” Mr.

Mahal said. “We’ve even seen co-workers booking together. They figure if we have to work from home, we might as well go rent a house in Hawaii. ” Get an informed guide to the global outbreak with our daily coronavirus newsletter.

To tap into this new market, Mr. Mahal made a “coronavirus flight alert,” a program that aggregates cheap flights and emails users suggested itineraries. “If you’re comfortable with the risk, the prices are like the cheapest they’ve been in 10 years,” Mr. Mahal said.

“Flights are cheap, lodging is cheap, there are no tourists. ” Traveling during the pandemic flies in the face of expert advice and government advisories. Travelers who are infected, even if they are not showing symptoms, may transport and spread the virus to a new location, or contaminate an airplane, cab or Airbnb. While they may be healthy enough to survive the virus, they could be putting others at risk.