Air New Zealand is making some adjustments to its regional flight schedules reflecting recent feedback from local stakeholders and to meet growing demand on a number of routes. Earlier this year the airline introduced a revised domestic schedule, taking effect progressively throughout 2016, aimed at enhancing the customer experience for Kiwis and visitors to New Zealand by delivering improved connectivity to domestic and international services and more consistent weekday departure times, particularly for peak morning and early evening business travelers. Air New Zealand General Manager Networks Richard Thomson says the airline is committed to operating a comprehensive domestic schedule delivering connectivity and consistency while also meeting the key needs of each community. “The new schedules have been generally well received by customers, although a couple of communities raised concerns around new peak business flight timings. “A strength of our business is the emphasis we place on consultation and responding to customer feedback. While the response to the new schedule was very positive we have listened carefully to stakeholder and customer feedback and we’re pleased to have been able to overcome some key challenges identified in the following communities”.
Whangarei
From 30 October, the first flight of the day from Whangarei to Auckland (Monday-Saturday) will be retimed to depart at 7.10am – 45 minutes earlier than originally proposed. The new 7.10am service will be available for booking from early June.
Kerikeri
From 30 October, the first flight from Kerikeri to Auckland will depart on weekdays at 6.00am. This will be achieved by continuing to overnight an aircraft in Kerikeri to enable the early morning departure. Kerikeri is one of the routes benefiting from the replacement of the 19 seat Beech fleet with the larger 50 seat Q300 aircraft, which has allowed the airline to offer customers more lower priced fares. Air New Zealand will operate an additional 10,000 seats between Kerikeri and Auckland in FY17.
Tauranga
Air New Zealand will reinstate an early morning service, departing from Tauranga to Christchurch at 6.05am, and will operate up to 10 new weekly services between Auckland and Tauranga. This is a significant regional growth market and the airline will operate up to 80,000 additional seats to and from Tauranga during FY17.
Source : Air New Zealand Media Release
Massive increase of Tauranga!. I was concerned that they no longer had an early morning CHC departure but now it seems to be reinstated. 80,000 extra seats is a lot of extra capacity. Is Jetstar eyeing TRG as there next city? Watch this space..
ReplyDeleteWoo...Me gets the feeling that a certain airline with silver painted Q300s was eyeing up the gap?
ReplyDeleteYes it certainty looks that way. Will be great having that early morning departure again from Air NZ.
DeleteI wonder if Jetstar was eyeing the AKL, or WLG route. The CHC route doesn't fit with their current AKL hub structure. By linking WLG, they can access CHC and NSN. Interesting times ahead for regional NZ..
I would expect that they are eyeing up AKL to TRG only not from WLG as that is where the Q300 operation is based and has down time between flights in the existing JQ schedule that they could add in a couple of AKL-TRG-AKL rotations with little effort.
DeleteYes the AKL route seems likely out of the two. They would get great feed both internationally and domestically. OOL, BNE, MEL, SYD, PER (seasonally) plus LAX (AA) then domestically they would feed into CHC, WLG, NSN, PMR, ZQN, DUD. I wonder if we will see the AKL-TRG route this year or will they wait till they have some bedded down their current regional operations.
DeleteWill be interesting if Jetstar add this route this year or wait until operations are synchronised. They will also get feed into RAR, NAN.
DeleteTRG is also about to start at terminal expansion worth almost 5m.