Pre-flight "rapid COVID” testing conversation

Booking flexibility, ticket refundability (due to flight cancellations), peace of mind & trust through the end-to-end travel chain (taxi, airport, airline, hotel, restaurant, tour operator) and pre-departure testing seems to be the 4 key major consideration to make a positive booking and travel plans. Regarding pre-flight testing, airlines are scrambling to figure out how to test passengers effectively to open up routes that are off limits or require long quarantines.

If testing before departure diminish passengers fear and anxiety to travel (perhaps the most uncontrollable variable airlines need to deal with today) and serve as a tool to incentivize  positive/confirmed bookings, airlines should offer said service free of charge or at a very low cost to passengers as a key incentive to rebuild demand while reassuring passengers it is safe to travel. 

Under a pilot program, United Airlines commented passengers should pay for testing (between US$250 or US$ 80 for a mail-in test option) which in my opinion won’t fly at least with VFR and leisure traffic which at this point in time seems to be only one willing to travel (pent-up and post pent-up demand). Based on US DOT T2 traffic, US airlines passenger domestic load factor averaged 37.6% in 2Q 2020 vs. 87.3% in 2019. Wow! Similarly, traffic to Latin America averaged 36.9% in Q2 2020 vs. 84.9% in 2019. This shows us that there is a long way to go to rebuild confidence and to stimulate demand.

If I were UA and as it tries to contain daily cash burn and preserve liquidity, I will spin this one off differently - Partnerships. A simple strategy is to partner with intended departure airport(s) in its pilot program and test supplier(s) to share/split the bill. In the meantime, Lufthansa is launching a pre-flight "rapid COVID testing" in October which returns a result in 15 minutes using a disposable US$5 device made from US-based Abbott Laboratories. Is there a price/testing mode disconnect in here?

Airlines have no time to waste if they want to kick-start demand.

Besides, test accuracy is another issue that needs to be resolved. In mid-April, Emirates became first airline to trial rapid COVID-19 testing at airports but needed to reevaluate it as it showed only 30% test accuracy rather than the 80% target.

Comments appreciated. 

UA link: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/24/united-airlines-to-offer-coronavirus-tests-for-hawaii-bound-passengers-for-coronavirus.html

Lufthansa link: https://www.executivetraveller.com/news/lufthansa-covid-testing

EK link: https://onemileatatime.com/emirates-inaccurate-rapid-covid-19-testing/