Estimation question

Estimate the number of passengers per year in post-COVID world in August travelling from the US to the EU.

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Estimation with realistic post-pandemic adjustment: decomposing travel demand and applying a recovery discount to pre-pandemic baselines.

Define scope: passengers flying from the US to the EU specifically in the month of August, a known peak summer travel month.
Anchor to a baseline: recall or estimate pre-pandemic annual transatlantic passenger volume, for example on the order of tens of millions of passengers a year between the US and Europe.
Break down seasonality: August likely represents a disproportionate share of annual transatlantic leisure travel, assume roughly 12 to 15 percent of annual volume falls in that single month.
Apply a post-COVID recovery discount: assume travel has recovered to some percentage of pre-pandemic levels, for example an assumed 70 to 90 percent recovery depending on how 'post-COVID' is defined.
Calculate the final estimate by combining the annual baseline, the August seasonality share, and the recovery discount, and sanity check the order of magnitude.
State the assumption clearly that 'post-COVID' timing significantly changes this number, and offer to adjust if the interviewer specifies a particular year.

Anchors to a real, recognizable pre-pandemic baseline instead of guessing a number with no reference point.
Explicitly separates seasonality (August being a peak month) from the pandemic recovery factor, rather than conflating them into one guess.
States the recovery percentage as an explicit, adjustable assumption, showing awareness that the actual answer depends heavily on which year is meant.

Giving a single number without anchoring to any real baseline or showing the decomposition.
Ignoring August's seasonal peak and treating it like an average month.

How would your estimate change if this were December instead of August?
What data would you want to validate this estimate if you had access to airline data?