Air New Zealand India direct flights demand, Digi Mart USA News (New Zealand): Air New Zealand chief executive Nikhil Ravishankar says demand for flights between New Zealand and India needs to grow before the airline starts flying that route. He made the comments at the NZ-India Business, Sport and Innovation Summit, held at the NZ International Convention Centre in Auckland on Friday, according to the publisher’s report.
Ravishankar said direct flights would be justified only if three types of travel demand existed: visiting friends and relatives, corporate travel and tourist travel. He said visiting friends and relatives demand already exists, driven by the Indian diaspora, but corporate and tourist demand are not yet strong enough.
He said travellers within India often need to reach cities beyond New Delhi and Mumbai, and that a transit hub such as Singapore is currently a better option than a direct flight for many of them. He pointed to Singapore’s connections to about 16 cities and described Changi as one of the best transit experiences in the world.
Ravishankar said he did not agree that demand would appear simply if Air New Zealand provided capacity, saying the build-it-and-they-will-come approach does not work. He said he was focused on helping drive demand and believed the India NZ Free Trade Agreement would be crucial for building corporate travel between the two countries.
Ravishankar did not give a date for direct flights, saying only that direct connections between New Zealand and India were almost inevitable and depended on investing in the relationship. When asked where he saw the relationship in five years, he said he personally believed direct flights would exist within that time.
Auckland Airport chief executive Carrie Hurihanganui, speaking on a later panel, agreed on the importance of hub connections through Southeast Asia but said it was also important to build the case for direct flights. She said only about half of current demand would be needed to justify a direct connection, and that the value of air cargo between the two countries had doubled over 10 years to around $370 million.
The summit was held in Auckland on Thursday and Friday, partly to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of sporting relations between India and New Zealand, and came less than a month after the NZ India Free Trade Agreement entered into force.
