Business travel still hasn’t fully bounced back from the pandemic slump, and recent economic gyrations make the recovery path from here much trickier, leaving airlines dependent on leisure travelers whose post-COVID habits may prove fickle in a downturn.

First-quarter earnings for U.S. airlines have been disappointing, with the top carriers that have reported full results so far — Delta, United and Alaska Air — all citing a shift in traditional booking patterns that made the already seasonally weak months of January and February even weaker.

Airlines broadly abolished change and cancellation fees during the pandemic, and this has made leisure travelers more comfortable buying plane tickets further in advance but also more comfortable scrapping trips at the last minute if needed.

Before COVID, business travelers would regularly buy flights closer to the departure date, even if that meant paying a premium, and were also more likely to take trips in January and February than vacationers. But with the corporate travel recovery still lagging, that backstop isn’t there.

“We believe demand is just structurally different than it was pre-pandemic, and we’re still figuring out that new normal,” United Chief Executive Officer Scott Kirby said this week on a call to discuss the airline’s first-quarter results.

None of the large airlines that have reported so far this earnings season are forecasting substantial improvement in business travel this year, but they also aren’t projecting a deterioration in demand, either. Delta is counting on stabilization in corporate flying traffic at about a 75% recovery relative to pre-pandemic levels, President Glen Hauenstein said on the company’s earnings call last week.

Recent data, however, suggest this category of corporate spending is particularly vulnerable in times of financial stress, and airlines are starting to acknowledge that this stress is tangible. After projecting nothing but blue skies for air-travel demand for months, United offered the first break in this narrative. “It seems clear that the macro risks are higher today than they were even a few months ago,” Kirby said. “Our base case, therefore, remains a mild recession or soft landing.” This feels like a mismatch.

Demand for corporate trips from the technology sector was gaining momentum in the third quarter of last year but has since taken a step back amid a wave of layoffs and tighter cost controls in the sector, Alaska Air said this week. The airline primarily caters to leisure travelers, but its focus on the West Coast makes it particularly reliant on the technology sector for the corporate side of its business. On a volume basis, business flight demand in the technology industry has recovered to only about 50% to 60% of pre-pandemic levels, compared with a 75% recovery in overall corporate travel at Alaska.

The carrier characterized the lackluster West Coast business travel recovery as an “opportunity,” particularly as more technology companies bring workers back to the office, but Alaska is also weighing capacity adjustments that suggest it’s not expecting corporate road warriors to fill up planes in the winter months in the near future.

“We need to do a much better job at matching supply and demand in what seems to be a weaker January and February,” Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Harrison said on the company’s earnings call. “Some of the hub-to-hub heavy traditional business traffic markets, we’re going to sort of trim back and maybe put that capacity elsewhere,” he added.

Meanwhile, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank into Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. receivership on March 10 triggered a noticeable drop in near-term domestic business travel at United. This only lasted about two weeks, and demand has since bounced back to previous trend lines. But it’s worrying that there was such a quick reaction in travel budgets to the banking sector woes.

While corporate travel has always been vulnerable to economic downswings, the successful migration of many meetings to virtual platforms during the pandemic forced a reevaluation of how much in-person face time was actually necessary. There’s no replacement for key client meetings and certain large group gatherings such as conferences and conventions. Contrary to the early predictions of the pandemic, business travel is far from dead. But the corporate world did manage fairly well for quite a long time with Zoom calls, so when costs need to be cut, travel is an even easier bucket to target than it was before.

United looks at business travel through three lenses: large corporations with airline contracts, trips booked through agencies that specialize in this kind of traffic and certain types of tickets that are more likely to be purchased by businesses, including small and medium-sized ones. Recovery rates to pre-pandemic levels across these three categories ranged from 95% to 101% in the first two weeks of April, United said, up from 85% to 97% in the first quarter. These are revenue measurements, though, meaning they encompass the effect of ticket-price inflation. In light of how much the economy has grown over the past few years, a 100% recovery in business travel to 2019 levels isn’t truly a full recovery.

The airlines are still bullish about the summer travel season overall, particularly in international markets that were still relatively closed off last year. They’re justified in that enthusiasm. Somewhat incredibly, consumer travel demand has remained robust despite soaring ticket prices and a series of unfortunate operational blowups at the airlines. (United, to its credit, said it had the lowest first-quarter seat cancellation rate since 2012 in the most recent period, even as weather affected many of its routes.) But the demand outlook in the fall and winter is murkier. Even a mild recession may crimp certain spending habits that have helped make up for still-stilted corporate spending. For example, leisure travelers have been more willing to splurge on premium seats. Work-from-home policies also mean they’re filling up more seats on off-peak days that were previously the domain of business travelers, rather than the typical weekend rush. If money is tighter, though, an economy seat will probably do and these blended business-leisure trips may become fewer and farther between.

It’s always telling when companies start talking about resiliency, and usually not in a good way. “If the economy softens further, we’ve prepared for it,” Kirby of United said. The company has reduced its total debt load by about $4.6 billion over the past year, putting its balance sheet in a better position to weather any additional weakness in the economy, and United also has flexibility to cut costs by trimming capacity, he said.

Southwest and American Airlines are due to report results on Thursday. American warned earlier this month that its first-quarter profit would likely fall short of estimates. The airline said revenue for each seat flown a mile is expected to increase about 26% in the period relative to the year earlier, hitting the midpoint of its previous guidance. That surprised some analysts who had been expecting a particularly robust revenue performance at American given its strong positioning in Latin American markets that are typically popular for sun-seekers in the winter months.

Brooke Sutherland is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering deals and industrial companies. A former M&A reporter for Bloomberg News, she writes the Industrial Strength newsletter.

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