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Air New Zealand is set to cancel around 1,100 flights over the next few months as it aims to cut fuel costs amid the ongoing Middle East crisis.
Speaking to RNZ, Air New Zealand chief executive Nikhil Ravishankar said while no routes will be axed entirely, services will be reduced “proportionally across the board”. The airline earlier this week suspended its financial guidance due to the volatility in fuel prices.
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“Between now and the end of April, early May, we’ll do about 22,000 flights, and we’re looking at about a five per cent reduction,” Ravishankar said.
“We will carry about 1.9 million customers over that same period, and 44,000 customers will need to be reaccommodated, and almost all of them will be reaccommodated on the same day.
“Route or frequency consolidation is something that we do as a business-as-usual practice, and this is just a version of that.”
“The way we’ve tried to consolidate the flying is to make sure that we focus on off peak times and reducing frequency where there’s frequency to be reduced. So routes where we don’t have frequency to fall back on, we’ve maintained the frequency.
“If you think about a port like Hokitika, where we only have two rotations a day, we have maintained that connectivity.”
According to Ravishankar, the airline is not looking to cut its long-haul US mainland flights through San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Houston.
“One of the things that is worth noting is we’re one of the few places where there is still safe passage if you’re trying to get from this part of the world into Europe, and so we don’t want to necessarily harm that level of capacity and connectivity,” he said.
“People want to get to Europe still, and over the US airspace, we can get them into Europe, and that’s what we’re focused on doing. The trimming of long-haul is fairly negligible. I think it’s three flights between now and the end of May.”
The move comes as Air New Zealand conducts a strategic review of its operations after posting a NZ$59 million loss in the first half of the financial year.
“As of this week and last, we’ve engaged about 4,000 Air New Zealanders to get involved in the process. So it’s quite an extensive review. It’ll take a couple of months still to complete,” Ravishankar added.
“We’re working through the details of it. At the moment, we’re focusing on some of the discretionary spend items and working with some of our suppliers to make sure that we can manage discretionary spend.
“One is staff travel, and where we can take those meetings with our global suppliers at the end of a telephone or a Teams call. That’s what we’ll do. But there’s many such examples.”
This week, Qantas announced an increase in international fares due to rising fuel prices.
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