Air NZ price cuts ‘short on facts’: travel agency
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 . . . 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, so to stay revenue neutral Air New Zealand would need to make top-end fares even more expensive to make up for the 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 inter-island for as low as $39.
‘‘We have shrunk our lowest fares by up to $45 in a move we believe will further supercharge domestic tourism,’’ he said.
The new fares are available for purchase immediately for travel from March 25.
Seat-only fares include Auckland to Gisborne or Kerikeri for $39 and Auckland to Blenheim or Nelson for $49.
Travellers at Marlborough Airport terminal in Blenheim yesterday had been eagerly waiting to see how their region would be affected.
Blenheim retiree Rob Leask said his children lived in Wellington so he and his wife would fly a few times a year, using discounted Grabaseat flights. If flights dropped to half the cost, they would fly more often.
The changes are the biggest shakeup to Air New Zealand’s domestic pricing structure since 2002 when it introduced ‘‘express class’’, which did away with business class on domestic routes to make way for more seats.