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Auckland, NEW ZEALAND — Air New Zealand will increase its Houston-Auckland service to a daily frequency in December, CEO Christopher Luxon said here Wednesday.
The flight, which Air New Zealand launched in December 2015, currently flies five days per week and is serviced by a Boeing 777-200. The frequency increase will occur as Air New Zealand begins flying a Boeing 787 Dreamliner to and from Houston.
His announcement, made at Tourism New Zealand’s annual TRENZ Conference, came on the heels of a 23% year-over-year increase in the number of Americans who visited New Zealand between April 2016 and March 2017. With 313,000 arrivals to New Zealand during that 12-month span, the U.S is the country’s third-largest source of visitors behind Australia and China.
Increased airlift has played a role in the 23% jump. United entered the New Zealand market with flights from San Francisco last summer and American also inaugurated service to Auckland, making the journey from Los Angeles.
Those flights, as well as Air New Zealand’s Auckland-Houston service, augmented longer-running Air New Zealand routes to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Honolulu, as well as a Hawaiian Airline service between Auckland and Honolulu.
United and Air New Zealand entered into a joint venture in March 2016, allowing them to coordinate on scheduling, most notably on the Houston route. Houston is a United hub that is faster to access from the eastern half of the U.S. than West Coast cities that service Auckland.
Luxon said the Houston flight has helped boost the number of visitors to New Zealand from the Midwest, Southeast, Northeast and south central U.S. by 24%, 29%, 11% and 30%, respectively.
Still, the Auckland airport’s modeling of visitor demand versus flight capacity shows that the U.S.-New Zealand market remains 33% underserved, airport CEO Adrian Littlefield said at the Trenz conference.
Leanne Cheesman, United’s national sales manager for New Zealand, bolstered that assertion, saying that the carrier’s San Francisco-Auckland flight had a load factor of 98% during the New Zealand summer months of January through March.
Luxon said his job is to educate Americans that New Zealand is just a 12-hour flight from Los Angeles, perhaps not as far away as they think.
“They have no idea on geography,” he quipped. “Lovely people, but no idea on geography.”
Sоurсе: travelweekly.com
