Raphael Stevens

International travel demand is recovering after a more than two-year Covid pandemic lull.
Airlines are deploying their choicest cabins in the hope of getting high-paying customers to shell out for more space on board.
Airline executives expect to pass along large amounts of increased fuel costs to customers.

A Singapore Airlines A380 first class suite
Leslie Josephs | CNBC

Singapore Airlines this week unveiled its highest-end offering in the U.S: first-class suites that feature a bed, a swivel chair, 32-inch touch screen and a desk adorned with an orchid. They are each 50 square feet, and there are two bathrooms for the six passengers.
It’s a bet that travelers are willing to shell out for luxurious cabins after two years of Covid pandemic lockdowns that devastated travel demand. Other airlines are taking similar steps with revamped cabins. They were able to do some upgrades faster during the pandemic when they didn’t need as many planes.

A roundtrip ticket in one of the Singapore Airlines suites from New York to Singapore, with a stop in Frankfurt, Germany, is listed on the company’s website at $17,143.37, including tax, for early May. One of the 78 new business-class seats on the A380 that convert into 6½-foot beds on the same dates are $6,362.87. Both cabins are on the upper deck of the superjumbo plane.
Passenger demand for both upper-deck cabins has been strong, said Joey Seow, Singapore Airlines’ regional vice president for the Americas. Business-class seats on the planes are selling out before the 343 economy seats, a reversal of a pre-pandemic trend, he said.
“Normally, people would choose to go for economy class because it’s cheaper,” Seow told CNBC aboard the A380 before it departed for Frankfurt on Monday evening. “We see that more and more people are prepared to pay for that space.”
Airlines around the world are hoping to benefit from the trend. It’s key for airlines as they try to return to profitability while facing new challenges, such as a labor shortage, a recent surge in fuel prices, new Covid-19 variants and Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

Premium outperforms

Over the last decade, airlines have looked for new ways to upsell passengers on more spacious seats, whether for front-of-the-plane suites and new business classes or premium economy, which is a roomier seat with more amenities that sits between standard coach and the front of the plane.

With business travel demand still about 40% below 2019 levels, so-called premium leisure travelers are especially important as a way to grow revenue again.
“We had originally thought that people would only pay if their company was paying for these products and services, Delta Air Lines President Glen Hauenstein said at a JPMorgan industry conference earlier this month. “What we found in the pandemic is there is a wide appetite from consumers who want to sit in better products and services.”
He said Delta wants to expand those offerings in the future.
“The margins are significantly higher in the premium products, and that’s really where we’re heading as an airline,” Hauenstein said.
Rival JetBlue Airways has made its Mint business class a central part of its new New York to London service, which it expects to expand with flights from Boston in the coming months.

Singapore Airlines A380 first class suites
Leslie Josephs | CNBC

Delta’s offering of premium seats is up proportionally versus 2019, partially because the airline has retrofitted some of its older planes with more spacious seats, said spokesman Drake Castaneda.
Carriers are banking on trans-Atlantic travel particularly this year, since several countries on both sides of the ocean have loosened Covid lockdowns in recent months, after two years of weak demand.

Growing schedules

Now carriers are ramping up for a big summer, bringing some of their largest jetliners that they used for domestic routes as a pandemic salve, to international routes that command much higher fares.
Airlines’ trans-Atlantic capacity in July, measured by seats, is down 10% from pre-pandemic July 2019 – but it’s up more than 170% from last year, according to flight data firm OAG.
United said it expects its trans-Atlantic capacity in July to be up 20% from 2019. It is flying Boeing 767-300ERs that have high numbers of premium seats — 46 Polaris business class, 22 premium economy, 43 extra legroom and 56 standard coach — from Newark, New Jersey, and Boston to London.
Fares are also up. Fare-tracking site Hopper said international flights are currently $810, up 25% from the start of the year when omicron infections surged during what is normally a seasonal lull and 2% shy of 2019 levels, while domestic fares have risen 40% from the beginning of the year and are up 8% from three years ago.

Singapore Airlines latest business class cabin debuts in New York
Leslie Josephs | CNBC

“At this point it doesn’t appear that higher airfares are having a significant effect on premium demand,” said Henry Harteveldt, a former airline executive and founder of travel consulting firm Atmosphere Research Group. “The premium customer will be the last to feel the impact of higher air fare simply because they have the means to afford premium travel.”
Long-haul trans-Pacific demand has been slower to return, particularly in China due to strict Covid lockdowns.
Singapore’s Seow said looser travel restrictions in other parts of Asia are helping spur new bookings, but travelers are also showing interest in its shorter legs, like JFK to Frankfurt on the A380.
“We hope that with a better product we can cater to more of the customers who in the past may not have chosen us,” he said.

Less margin for error

Carriers were able to experiment more freely during the pandemic. Historically low travel demand and a patchwork of countries that opened their borders sent airlines looking for opportunities to increase revenue where they could.
Now, with U.S. jet fuel prices up and uncertainty around Russia’s war in Ukraine and its impact in Eastern Europe, airlines have less margin for error. Airspace closures have also forced some carriers to fly longer routes to avoid Russia.
While United is still planning a robust trans-Atlantic schedule, last week the airline said it won’t fly nonstops between Washington’s Dulles and Berlin, Newark and Prague or Denver and Tokyo as planned.
“United makes regular adjustments to our schedule in response to a number of factors including demand, costs and resources,” the airline said in a statement. “We look forward to bringing these routes back into our network as soon as the market allows.”
Some airlines are also constrained by aircraft. American Airlines for example, last month said it would further trim some international routes such as Seattle-London due to a pause in Boeing 787 Dreamliner deliveries.
Some travelers are opting for more well-trafficked Western European destinations over Eastern Europe since the war broke out.
“We certainly have seen a dip in bookings for Eastern Europe and a rise in Western Europe,” said Kendra Guild, director of product and operations at SmarTours, which offers packages all over the world.
She said customers aren’t canceling but bookings to the Czech Republic, Poland and Croatia have dropped while countries including Portugal, Spain and Ireland are relatively strong.

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Sustainable Energy

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The energy transition depends on a multitude of factors, from technology and finance to international cooperation. All are bedeviled by a great deal of uncertainty and risk.
The above topics were considered in detail during a panel moderated by CNBC’s Dan Murphy at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Forum in Dubai.
Any transition to an economy centered around renewables and low-carbon technologies will require a vast amount of money.

This image shows an onshore wind turbine in the Netherlands.
Mischa Keijser | Image Source | Getty Images

Discussions about the energy transition, what it means and whether it’s actually underway at all, have become major talking points in recent years.  
How the transition — which can be seen as a shift away from fossil fuels to a system dominated by renewables — pans out remains to be seen.

It depends on a multitude of factors, from technology and finance to international cooperation. While crucial, all are bedeviled by a great deal of uncertainty and risk.
The above topics were considered in detail during a panel moderated by CNBC’s Dan Murphy at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Forum in Dubai on Tuesday.
“At the heart of the energy transition is digitalization,” Leo Simonovich, who is vice president and global head of industrial cyber and digital security at Siemens Energy, said.”In the energy sector, 2 billion devices are going to be added over the next couple of years,” he said.
“Every one of those devices could be a potential source of vulnerability that could be exploited by bad actors.”

Read more about clean energy from CNBC Pro

Expanding on his point, Simonovich explained the potential consequences of the above happening. “In a system that is increasingly connected and digitized, that includes legacy assets in need of digital assets, this could have cascading effects,” he said.

“And what we’re talking about is not just loss of data, what we’re really talking about is a safety issue, one that could bring down major parts of the grid or, as we saw with the Colonial Pipeline attack in the United States, parts of [the] gas network.”
Cybersecurity, Simonovich argued, was important both as “an opportunity to accelerate the energy transition if we can get it right because it builds trust, but also as a major source of risk that we need to address pretty urgently.”
Geopolitics
Alongside cybersecurity, geopolitics will also have a role to play if the planet is to shift to a low-carbon energy system, a point forcefully made by Abdurrahman Khalidi, chief technology officer of GE Gas Power, EMEA.
“It took the world several decades, until 2015, to arrive at almost a consensus in Paris, that global warming is happening and it’s due to greenhouse gases and the commitments started flowing,” Khalidi said. “It took us a lot of debate.”
Khalidi’s mention of Paris refers to the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming “to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels” and was adopted in Dec. 2015.
“For decarbonization to happen — as we saw in COP26 — you need … cooperative and collaborative world governments,” he said. “The risk I see right now [is that] the world is sharply polarized and the world is being divided along ‘with’ and ‘against’.”

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Khalidi’s comments come at a time when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has highlighted just how reliant some economies are on Russian oil and gas.
While the war in Ukraine has created geopolitical tension and division, it has also resulted in a number of initiatives defined by cooperation and shared aims.  
Last week, for example, the U.S. and European Commission issued a statement on energy security in which they announced the creation of a joint task force on the subject.
The parties said the U.S. would “strive to ensure” at least 15 billion cubic meters of extra liquefied natural gas volumes for the EU this year. They added this would be expected to increase in the future.
President Joe Biden said the U.S. and EU would also “work together to take concrete measures to reduce dependence on natural gas — period — and to maximize … the availability and use of renewable energy.”
Investing wisely
Given that fossil fuels play such a major role in modern life, any transition to an energy system and economy centered around renewables and low-carbon technologies will require a vast amount of money.
During Tuesday’s panel, the question of where this cash should be invested was tackled by Kara Mangone, who is global head of climate strategy at Goldman Sachs. Among other things, she stressed the importance of integration and commercial viability.
“Our research estimates that it’s going to take anywhere from 100 to 150 trillion [dollars] in capital, about 3 to 5 trillion a year — just an astronomical amount, we’re nowhere near that today — to deliver on the goals that were set forth in the Paris Agreement,” she said.
Around half of this capital would need to be focused on renewables and technologies that were already at a commercial scale, Mangone explained.
“But the other half, very importantly, will need to go into carbon capture, into hydrogen, into direct air capture, into sustainable aviation fuel, e-fuels — technologies that are not yet being adopted at commercial scale because they have not hit the price point where that can happen for a lot of companies.”
The trillion-dollar figures Mangone refers to are found within a report entitled “Climate Finance Markets and the Real Economy” which was published in late 2020. Goldman Sachs says it joined the Global Financial Markets Association Climate Finance Working Group to help inform the report.
Mangone went on to lay out how goals could be achieved in a commercially viable way.
“We cannot pull out financing from … the oil and gas sector, metals and mining, real estate, agriculture — these sectors that are really crucial to transition, that actually need the capital, that need the support to be able to execute on that.”
The above viewpoint follows on from comments made Monday by Anna Shpitsberg, deputy assistant secretary for energy transformation at the U.S. Department of State.
“We have always come out and said [the] oil and gas industry is critical to the transition,” Shpitsberg, who was speaking during a panel moderated by CNBC’s Hadley Gamble, said.  
“They are players in the energy system, they are key players,” she said. “They are the ones that will be pushing abatement options, they’re the ones that will be pushing hydrogen options.”
“And to be quite honest, they’re some of the ones that are putting significant investment into clean energy, including renewables.”
If these “critical stakeholders” were not engaged, Shpitsberg argued that goals relating to methane reduction and efficiency would not be reached.
“The messaging has been oil and gas companies have to be a part of the conversation. But we want them also to be a part of the conversation on the transition.”

Work to be done

Securing a successful energy transition represents a huge task, especially when one considers the current state of play. Fossil fuels are ingrained in the global energy mix, and companies continue to discover and develop oil and gas fields at locations around the world.
Earlier this month, the International Energy Agency reported that 2021 saw energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rise to their highest level in history. The IEA found energy-related global CO2 emissions increased by 6% in 2021 to reach a record high of 36.3 billion metric tons.
In its analysis, the world’s leading energy authority pinpointed coal use as being the main driver behind the growth. It said coal was responsible for more than 40% of overall growth in worldwide CO2 emissions last year, hitting a record of 15.3 billion metric tons.
“CO2 emissions from natural gas rebounded well above their 2019 levels to 7.5 billion tonnes,” the IEA said, adding that CO2 emissions from oil came in at 10.7 billion metric tons. More

In this file photo, the famous Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada neon sign is seen at dusk.
Joe Sohm | Visions Of America | Universal Images Group | Getty Images

Formula One will return to Las Vegas next year with the race taking place on the famous Las Vegas Strip.
The grand prix will be held on a Saturday night in November, potentially around Thanksgiving, with the track sweeping past some of the city’s most legendary landmarks, hotels and casinos.

The track design is 3.8 miles long from start to finish with top speeds estimated to be over 212 mph.
There will be 50 race laps with three main straights and 14 corners, including a high-speed cornering sequence and a single chicane section.
Stefano Domenicali, president and chief executive of Formula 1, said: “This is an incredible moment for Formula 1 that demonstrates the huge appeal and growth of our sport with a third race in the US.

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“Las Vegas is a destination known around the world for its excitement, hospitality, thrills, and of course, the famous Strip.
“There is no better place for Formula 1 to race than in the global entertainment capital of the world and we cannot wait to be here next year.”
Las Vegas’ neon nights will be the backdrop for F1’s third race in the U.S. along with the Miami and Texas Grands Prix.
Vegas previously hosted two F1 grands prix in the 1980s but instead of the Strip, they took place in the parking lot of the Caesars Palace hotel.
Last week Domenicali told Sky Sports F1’s Martin Brundle that Africa could also hold races in the future, with the calendar set to grow.

F1 is set for a record 23-race calendar this year but the current Concorde Agreement, which runs until 2025, allows 24 races per season.
South Africa’s Kyalami circuit — which Lewis Hamilton recently insisted should be back in F1 — last hosted a race in 1993 and has been mooted as an option.
“On top of America, on top of China, I think there is a potential also to be in Africa soon,” said Domenicali.
“There is a lot of interest there. For sure that’s another area that so far is missing in the geography of our calendar.”

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Actor Chris Rock speaks onstage during the 94th Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California on March 27, 2022.
Robyn Beck | Afp | Getty Images

Fans hoping Chris Rock would speak at length about Will Smith slapping him at the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday may have been disappointed Wednesday night during his first show since the incident in Boston.
In leaked audio from the sold-out show, Rock can be heard saying “I don’t have a bunch of s— to say about that.”

He joked with the crowd that he had written his latest stand-up show well in advance of the Oscars and said “I’m still kind of processing what happened.”
According to an NBC News reporter present at the show, Rock received multiple standing ovations. He started out by asking “So, how was your weekend?,” eliciting chuckles from the crowd.
Rock segued into his prepared material by saying “I’m just gonna tell some jokes” and telling the audience that “at some point I’ll talk about that s—”
Ticket sales for Rock’s comedy tour have skyrocketed in price on secondary markets since Sunday. StubHub, a ticket exchange and resale company, said it saw 25x the daily sales for Rock’s shows in the days following the Oscar incident, exceeding cumulative sales for the comedian’s tour during the entire month of March.
On Monday, Smith took to social media to formally apologize to Rock, calling his behavior “unacceptable and inexcusable.” He had previously apologized to the Academy and his fellow nominees during his acceptance speech for best actor on Sunday.

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Will Smith was asked to leave the 94th annual Academy Awards ceremony Sunday after slapping presenter Chris Rock, but refused.
The organization behind the Oscars said its board of governors have initiated a disciplinary proceeding against Smith for violating the group’s standards of conduct.
During the board’s next meeting on April 18 it will decide what action it will take, if any, including suspension or expulsion.

Will Smith was asked to leave the 94th annual Academy Awards ceremony Sunday after slapping presenter Chris Rock, but refused, according to a new statement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Wednesday.
The organization behind the Oscars said its board of governors have initiated a disciplinary proceeding against Smith for violating the group’s standards of conduct. During the board’s next meeting on April 18 it will decide what action it will take, if any, including suspension or expulsion.

“Mr. Smith’s actions at the 94th Oscars were a deeply shocking, traumatic event to witness in-person and on television,” The Academy said in its statement. “Mr. Rock, we apologize to you for what you experienced on our stage and thank you for your resilience in that moment. We also apologize to our nominees, guests and viewers for what transpired during what should have been a celebratory event.”
The incident occurred during the latter half of the ceremony when Rock told several jokes ahead of announcing the winner for best documentary. One joke was aimed at Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair, which prompted her spouse, Smith, to march up to the stage and slap Rock.
ABC cut out the mics, but uncensored international feeds picked up Smith yelling profanities at Rock.
For days audiences have speculated why Smith was not removed from the ceremony after the altercation. It’s unclear exactly how or when he was asked to leave, but, ultimately, he remained at the Dolby Theater and accepted the award for best actor later in the evening.
The Academy said it recognizes “we could have handled the situation differently.”

Wanda Sykes, who hosted the event alongside Amy Schumer and Regina Hall, told Ellen Degeneres during a segment to be aired in April she didn’t see the slap live, but called the incident “sickening.”
“I physically felt ill and I’m still a little traumatized by it,” she said. “And for them to let him stay in that room and enjoy the rest of the show and accept his award—I was like, ‘How gross is this?’ This is just the wrong message. You assault somebody, you get escorted out of the building and that’s it. For them to let him continue, I thought it was gross.”
On Monday, Smith took to social media to formally apologize to Rock, calling his behavior “unacceptable and inexcusable.” He had previously apologized to the Academy and his fellow nominees during his speech on Sunday.
Rock has yet to address the incident, but will make his first public appearance Wednesday night in Boston where he set to perform two back-to-back shows at the Wilbur Theatre. The anticipation has sent second-market ticket sales soaring.
Read the full statement from the Academy:

The Board of Governors today initiated disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Smith for violations of the Academy’s Standards of Conduct, including inappropriate physical contact, abusive or threatening behavior, and compromising the integrity of the Academy.
Consistent with the Academy’s Standards of Conduct, as well as California law, Mr. Smith is being provided at least 15 days’ notice of a vote regarding his violations and sanctions, and the opportunity to be heard beforehand by means of a written response. At the next board meeting on April 18, the Academy may take any disciplinary action, which may include suspension, expulsion, or other sanctions permitted by the Bylaws and Standards of Conduct.
Mr. Smith’s actions at the 94th Oscars were a deeply shocking, traumatic event to witness in-person and on television. Mr. Rock, we apologize to you for what you experienced on our stage and thank you for your resilience in that moment. We also apologize to our nominees, guests and viewers for what transpired during what should have been a celebratory event.
Things unfolded in a way we could not have anticipated. While we would like to clarify that Mr. Smith was asked to leave the ceremony and refused, we also recognize we could have handled the situation differently.

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