Airlines flashed an early warning signal Tuesday, suggesting that consumers and businesses were starting to get nervous amid wider economic and political uncertainty.

Several carriers cut their financial forecasts for the first few months of the year, saying that revenue would be weaker than expected. They pointed to a number of reasons: bad weather, high-profile plane crashes and less spending by consumers, businesses and the federal government.

“We just went through a little bit of a parade of horribles,” Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines, said at the J.P. Morgan Industrials Conference on Tuesday morning.

Delta, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines all downgraded their revenue forecasts for the first quarter compared with earlier projections. Those revised projections suggest that uncertainty and flagging economic confidence have started to take a toll on travel, which can be an early indicator for other industries.

But the news was not all bad. Airlines still expect revenue in the first quarter to be about the same, if not higher than, the same period last year. And most are optimistic about the rest of 2025.

The softening travel spending also appeared to be limited, for now, to flights within the United States and to lower-priced fares, according to Delta and United Airlines.

“Good news is that international, long haul, Hawaii, premium, all remain really strong,” Scott Kirby, United’s CEO, said at the investor conference. United did not revise its quarterly forecast, but Kirby said that he expected to finish the quarter at the low end of its financial projections.

Delta similarly said that premium and international travel remained strong, which was welcome news to analysts, who were surprised by the size of the cut to its forecasts. But that may not be enough to ease all investors’ concerns, according to Andrew Didora, an analyst at the Bank of America.

“Investors will worry about this spreading,” Didora said in an investor note. “The key question is whether the demand weakness is transitory.”

United, American and Southwest each also reported a decline in government spending on travel as the Trump administration makes deep cuts to various agencies.

Share prices for United, American and Delta fell Tuesday. Southwest and JetBlue Airways were up as investors seemed reassured by those airlines’ efforts to control costs and boost revenue.

— New York Times

U.S. job postings were up in January

U.S. employers posted 7.7 million vacancies in January, the Labor Department reported Tuesday, up from 7.5 million. The outlook for the labor market is murky as Trump wages a trade war with foreign countries, purges federal workers and threatens to deport millions of immigrants.

Layoffs fell slightly in January, and the number of Americans quitting their jobs rose.

The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey showed that openings rose in real estate, health care, manufacturing and construction firms. Federal government agencies posted 135,000 jobs, down from 138,000 in December. The fallout from purges of federal workers by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is not expected to show up in labor market data at least until the February numbers come out.

Southwest ends bags-fly-free policy

Southwest Airlines will begin charging customers a fee to check bags, abandoning a decades-long practice that executives had described last fall as key to differentiating the budget carrier from its rivals.

Southwest, which built years of advertising campaigns around its policy of letting passengers check up to two bags for free, said Tuesday that people who haven’t either reached the upper tiers of its Rapid Rewards loyalty program, bought a business class ticket or hold the airline’s credit card will have to pay for checked bags.

The airline did not outline the fee schedule but said the new policy would start with flights booked on May 28.

“We have tremendous opportunity to meet current and future customer needs, attract new customer segments we don’t compete for today, and return to the levels of profitability that both we and our shareholders expect,” CEO Bob Jordan said in a statement.

— From news services