Air NZ pricing ‘short on facts’
More facts are needed in order to determine who will benefit from Air New Zealand’s new pricing model, a travel agent says.
Yesterday Air New Zealand chief executive Christopher Luxon said the airline was immediately cutting entry-level airfares by up to 50 per cent on 41 domestic routes in what he described as its biggest pricing shakeup in more than 10 years.
The result would be more than 750,000 seats a year available for less than $50, he said.
However, House of Travel commercial director Brent Thomas said time would tell whether this would lower the average cost of airfares across the board or benefit only customers who had flexibility in what time and days they travelled.
‘‘We’re short on facts at the moment. There’s a whole lot of questions. What we don’t know is if this is a revenue-neutral position or a true haircut for airfares,’’ Thomas said.
Flights were near capacity on many domestic routes already, so to stay revenue neutral Air New Zealand would need to make top-end fares even more expensive in order to make up for the new, discounted fares, he said.
It would not become clear how material the impacts of the new pricing would be until new average airfares were calculated over at least a three-month period.
Luxon said travellers would be able to fly within each island and interisland for as low as $39. Brent Thomas, House of Travel