NZ-HK-UK with Air NZ

[MotherBear]

Hong Kong route fills Air NZ seats
5:00AM Tuesday May 22, 2007
By Malcolm Burgess



Air New Zealand's new route to Britain via Kong Kong and cutting back of transtasman services helped pack its planes with more passengers last month.

The airline said yesterday that its passenger load factor - the proportion of seats filled - improved by 5.9 percentage points to 80.2 per cent in April, compared with a year earlier.

Fuelling this overall result was an 11.4 percentage point boost in the long haul route to the UK via Asia and Japan sector to 82.2 per cent. Passenger numbers on that route are up 55 per cent on a year ago.

"Hong Kong has significantly boosted traffic performance to/from Asia and also beyond traffic to/from Europe," the airline said.

More here..

[kokopeli]

I sat next to an off-duty AirNZ pilot on an internal flight last week. He told me that fewer passengers are travelling with them from the UK to NZ (or back) via LA because the US security checks are a nightmare, even for transit passengers. People are still flying with them from the UK to LA and NZ to LA, but not many are going straight through. I guess the HK route is their attempt to stem the flow.