How a passenger-transportation or travel-services employer operates
A typical employer in this industry is a privately held fleet or agency whose product is the movement of people in groups, and every one of its functions runs on a governmental permission and a counterparty's freedom to travel and assemble: a motorcoach company running charters, tours, commuter and casino runs and school and athletic trips; a school-bus contractor operating home-to-school and special-needs routes under multi-year district contracts; a limousine, black-car, taxi or airport-shuttle fleet under municipal and State for-hire regulation; a sightseeing, excursion or dinner-boat operator or a private ferry; an on-demand part 135 air-charter operator, a fixed-base operator or a flight school; or a travel agency or tour operator packaging air, lodging, ground transportation and admissions for leisure, corporate, student and inbound groups.1 The eleven functions below are described in operational terms an order can reach, and each was reached in every quarter by the instruments the layers section inventories. The statute those orders are measured against is read element by element at The Statute.
CH, charter, tour and group service
The charter operator sells the coach and the driver by the trip or by the day to a school, an athletic program, a church, a senior center, a tour company, a convention, a corporate meeting, a wedding party or a casino. The trip exists because a group has somewhere to be together: a tournament, a field trip, a festival, a graduation, a trade show, a game, a service, a show. Revenue follows the calendar of group meetings, peaking in the spring trip and prom season, the summer tour and festival season and the fall foliage and convention season, and the operator keeps a fleet sized to that calendar, financed by lien, insured, inspected and staffed by drivers holding commercial driver licenses with the passenger endorsement. Every element of the function is a "group meeting" in the statute's words moving from one place to another, and every gathering ban, gathering cap, venue closure, casino closure, convention-center closure, school closure, stay-at-home order and traveler quarantine of the six quarters was an order limiting the meeting the charter existed to carry.
SB, school and contract routes
The school-bus contractor operates home-to-school, special-needs, activity and field-trip routes under annual per-route or per-bus contracts with districts and private schools, and employee and campus shuttles under contract with employers and colleges. Its revenue is contractual and calendar-bound: late August to June, with summer school and activity trips. Its buses are titled, inspected and registered at State motor-vehicle offices; its drivers hold commercial driver licenses with passenger and school-bus endorsements obtained through State knowledge and skills tests, medical certificates, fingerprinting and background checks; its operations are governed by State education agencies' transportation rules. When a State closes its schools to in-person instruction, the route has no passengers and the contract has no service to render; when a State orders remote or hybrid instruction, buses run at fractions of their rosters under capacity and face-covering rules; when a State conditions the 2021-22 school year on the infection-prevention regime of universal masking, quarantine of exposed children and testing or vaccination of drivers, the contractor operates under those conditions. Three sovereigns said so in the spring of 2020 in statutes and orders that presuppose the idling: New Jersey's payments "as if the services ... had been provided, and as if the school facilities had remained open"; Pennsylvania's payments "during the period of school closure" conditioned on weekly proof that "complement levels remain at or above the level on March 13, 2020"; Connecticut's payments so providers could "compensate their active employees and provide them health insurance ... whether or not services are actually or immediately rendered."2 Those regimes exist because the operation was suspended; a legislature does not enact payment "as if" services had been provided for services that were.
LM, limousine, taxi, shuttle and airport service
The for-hire fleet carries passengers from airports, cruise ports, hotels, offices, homes, weddings and events under medallions, permits and licenses issued by municipal taxi and limousine commissions, State public utility commissions and airport authorities. Its revenue is the fare, the account, the airport queue and the event booking, and its dispatch is the meeting of a driver, a vehicle and a passenger who has somewhere to go. The airport-shuttle and cruise-transfer segments follow the airline and cruise calendars exactly. Every stay-at-home order removed the passenger from the street; every gathering ban removed the wedding and the gala; every quarantine order, entry proclamation and cruise order removed the arriving traveler at the curb; every airline schedule reduction under the federal minimum-service orders fixed how many arrivals there were to carry; the pooled-ride ban and the for-hire orders' exposure-control requirements (face coverings, capacity caps and back-door boarding wherever feasible) fixed how the ride that remained was conducted; and from February 1, 2021 federal law fixed who could board.3
AV, air charter, fixed-base operations and flight training
The part 135 on-demand operator sells the aircraft and crew by the flight; the fixed-base operator sells fuel, hangar and ramp space, ground handling and passenger services to airlines, charters and general aviation; the part 141 or part 61 flight school sells training hours and checkrides. Each depends on federal certificates held by pilots and instructors, renewed by medical examinations, recurrent training and checking on federal cycles, and on the freedom of the passenger and the student to travel. The Federal Aviation Administration's own finding, published in the Federal Register, was that airmen "have been unable to comply with certain training, recent experience, testing, and checking requirements due to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak"; the Department of Transportation fixed the airline network the fixed-base operator serves by order from April 7, 2020 to September 30, 2020, from January 15 to March 31, 2021 and from May 14, 2021 to September 30, 2021; the Transportation Security Administration's directives placed every airport and aircraft under the federal exposure-control regime from February 1, 2021, a face covering for every passenger and refusal of boarding and removal for the non-compliant; and the entry proclamations, the pre-departure testing order and the consular suspension governed who could fly in.4
FR, ferries and water passenger service
State and municipal ferry systems, private ferries, water taxis, excursion boats, whale-watch and dinner cruises carry passengers and vehicles on scheduled and seasonal services, with onboard food and retail. The vessel and its crew operate under Coast Guard inspection, credentialing and Captain of the Port authority, under State department of transportation control where the State runs the ferry, and under the health orders of the ports at either end. The March 2020 orders closed the destinations (Ocracoke to visitors, the San Juan Islands to reservation-holders, Sidney, British Columbia to everyone under the land-border notices), cut the sailings, confined the foot passenger, screened the boarding passenger under Alaska's mandates and, from February 1, 2021, placed every passenger and crew member under the federal conveyance order's airborne-transmission controls, a requirement the Coast Guard restated for "all commercial vessels" and every passenger terminal.5
TA, travel agencies and tour operators
The agency earns commissions and service fees on air, cruise, lodging and packaged travel; the tour operator sells the package and holds the group's deposits; the receptive operator hosts inbound foreign groups; the corporate travel manager books the business trip. Every sale is a sale of travel to a destination and, for group and tour products, of a group meeting at the destination. The No Sail Order and the Conditional Sailing Order removed the cruise product from March 14, 2020 through the third quarter of 2021; the entry proclamations and the consular suspension removed the inbound group and the foreign destination; the land-border notices closed Canada and Mexico to "tourism purposes" from March 21, 2020 to November 8, 2021; the traveler-quarantine orders of twenty-six States and the District removed the domestic destination for the days of the quarantine; Hawaii's regime governed every Hawaii sale on every day of all six quarters; and the corporate travel bans and telework mandates of the federal government and the States removed the business traveler.6
MT, fleet maintenance, yards, garages and terminals
Coaches, buses, limousines and boats are maintained by licensed mechanics on inspection cycles fixed by State law and federal regulation, stored in yards and terminals, registered and titled at State motor-vehicle offices, and insured. The function is a workplace under every State's employer code, its workplace infection-prevention and exposure-control orders, face coverings among them, and its occupational-safety standard, and its compliance calendar ran through the motor-vehicle offices that closed in March 2020 and the inspection deadlines that States suspended and then reinstated.7
HR, hiring, screening, training and credentialing
The industry's workforce is credentialed by government: commercial driver licenses and learner permits with passenger and school-bus endorsements issued after knowledge and skills tests at State motor-vehicle offices; Department of Transportation medical certificates; fingerprinting and background checks; airman and instructor certificates and medicals; mariner credentials examined at Coast Guard Regional Examination Centers; Transportation Worker Identification Credentials; airport and port badges. The offices that issue those credentials closed to the public in at least twenty States and the District in March 2020, cancelled skills tests, and ran on appointment regimes and emergency extensions thereafter; the Coast Guard closed every Regional Examination Center on March 19, 2020 and extended mariner credentials to October 31, 2021; the Federal Aviation Administration extended airman medicals, knowledge tests and part 135 checking cycles by rule to April 30, 2021; and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's waiver of expiring commercial licenses, permits and medical certificates, as implemented by the States, ran to November 30, 2021.8
OP, office, dispatch, sales and administration
Dispatch, reservations, ticketing counters, sales and accounting sit in offices that were closed to the public or ordered to telework under the stay-at-home and telework mandates of March 2020, reopened at capped occupancy under the reopening orders and, in 2021, operated under State workplace standards and the Delta-wave indoor face-covering orders, the airborne-transmission controls the States and metros reinstated in August 2021. The drug-and-alcohol testing program every Department of Transportation-regulated carrier runs depended on collection sites and substance-abuse professionals whose in-person requirements the Department suspended from April 4, 2020 to December 31, 2021.9
WF, workforce availability
Drivers, chauffeurs, deckhands, pilots, instructors, mechanics, dispatchers and travel advisors are hourly workers whose jobs cannot be done from home; they commute, often by transit; their children attend schools and child-care centers. Every school closure, remote-instruction order and child-care emergency-only order removed the parent from the shift; every quarantine and isolation order removed the exposed worker for ten to fourteen days; the FFCRA leave mandate of April 1 to December 31, 2020 obliged every employer under 500 employees to provide paid leave to any employee "subject to a Federal, State, or local quarantine or isolation order" or whose child's "school or place of care" had been closed; the federal conveyance order's exposure controls governed every commute by transit; and in the third quarter of 2021 the school-worker vaccination-or-testing orders of New York, California, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey and Connecticut reached contractors' drivers.10
CB, the customer base
The customers are school districts and private schools under closure and remote-instruction orders; tour groups, senior centers, churches and athletic programs under gathering caps and event bans; conventions, casinos and attractions under closure and capacity orders; cruise lines under the No Sail and Conditional Sailing Orders; airlines under the Department of Transportation's minimum-service orders and the CDC and TSA regimes; corporate travel departments under telework mandates and federal travel restrictions; inbound foreign groups under the entry proclamations, the visa suspension and the land-border notices; and travelers of every kind under twenty-six States' quarantine orders and Hawaii's and Kansas's continuing mandates. Each counterparty's order is an order limiting travel or group meetings in terms, and the commerce it limited was this industry's.
Suppliers and inputs
Motorcoaches, school buses and their parts are built in plants that the Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania and New Jersey manufacturing closures shut in the spring of 2020 and that the chip and freight shortages of 2021 constrained; fuel, insurance, airport and port landlords and toll authorities are the other inputs, and the toll authorities converted to cashless collection under the Governors' emergency orders in March 2020.11
Seasonality and geography
Charter and tour revenue peaks in the spring (school trips, tournaments, spring break, proms and graduations), the summer (leisure tours, camps, festivals) and the fall convention season; school-bus contractors earn on the school calendar; airport and cruise-port transfer fleets follow the airline and cruise calendars; ferries and excursion boats are seasonal in the North and year-round in Florida, Hawaii and Puget Sound; flight training runs year-round with summer peaks; travel agencies book in January through March for the summer and in the fall for the winter and cruise seasons. The March 2020 orders struck at the start of the spring charter season and cancelled the whole 2020 spring and summer of trips; the 2020-21 school year ran remote or hybrid by order in most large States; the 2021 cruise season did not begin until the late-June test voyages under the Conditional Sailing Order; and the 2021-22 school year opened in August and September 2021 under the federal conveyance order's face-covering requirement on every school bus, the States' school infection-prevention orders (universal masking, exclusion and quarantine of exposed persons) and driver vaccination-or-testing conditions, so that the third quarter of 2021 was the quarter in which the industry's largest contract season restarted under orders.12
The counterparty map
For each counterparty class, the orders that reached it, by category, with the layer in which this analysis inventories them: school districts and private schools (closure, remote-instruction, bus-capacity and bus face-covering orders and the 2021-22 infection-prevention orders of masking, quarantine and driver testing; the fifty States); group customers and venues (gathering bans and caps, venue, casino and convention-center closures, vaccination-proof conditions of entry; the fifty States and the largest metros); travelers (stay-at-home orders, traveler quarantines, entry proclamations, land-border notices, the pre-departure testing order, Hawaii's Safe Travels; the federal layer and the fifty States); cruise lines and airlines (the No Sail and Conditional Sailing Orders, the minimum-service orders, the conveyance order and the airport and aircraft directives; the federal layer and the sector regulators); corporate customers (federal and State telework mandates and travel restrictions; the federal layer and the ecosystem); licensing bodies and public offices (motor-vehicle office closures and extensions, examination-center closures, certificate extensions; the sector regulators); the workforce's schools and child care (the school and child-care orders; the ecosystem).