Ardern Criticises Air NZ Over Cancelled Airfares

Air New Zealand’s handling of airfares cancelled due of coronavirus has been criticised by the NZ Prime Minister. “Air New Zealand could have handled it better,” Jacinda Ardern told Newstalk ZB.

Air New Zealand, which is 52 per cent owned by the Government, has been under fire for offering customers credit instead of refunds, only for the credits to be limited in the way in which they can be used. “As a major shareholder we want to make sure that customers are being looked after,” Ms Ardern said. As the COVID-19 outbreak spread throughout the world causing widespread disruption and prompting governments to close their borders airlines, including Air New Zealand, scrambled to cancel flights and radically reduce their networks.

In Air New Zealand’s case it slashed its network capacity by up to 95 per cent at one point.

In May Air New Zealand chief revenue officer Cam Wallace said since start of Alert Level 4 the airline had cancelled roughly 13,500 flights.

Ms Ardern said Air New Zealand’s communication to customers “most certainly could have been vastly improved”.

Air New Zealand had said it would be in a difficult financial position if it was refunding all non-refundable fares.

“They’ve also apologised for some of the management of the issue as well.”

In March the government offered a NZ$900 million (FJ$1,270.83m) loan to support the airline through COVID-19.

The airline had not yet drawn on the loan but said in the past it would need to if it was offering refunds on all cancelled fares.

Air New Zealand has provided refunds for some international flights where overseas law requires it, such as the United States and parts of Europe.

However, in New Zealand the same customer protections do not exist. Ms Ardern said the Government was looking at whether or not New Zealand legislation needed to be changed to be more aligned with some of the regulation that sat within the European Union and the United States.

“That’s a piece of work were going to do down the track.”

But any future changes wouldn’t be retrospective, meaning customers affected by coronavirus cancellations would not benefit. Ms Ardern said Air New Zealand needed to continue working through customer’s individual circumstances because there were cases of people who needed to rebook at short notice, she said. “I would just encourage them to keep working through that and prioritising people who need to get back home.”

In a message to Air New Zealand customers on Thursday Wallace said it was focused on creating a digital solution to enable the selfmanagement of credits. Stuff