Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 34 minutes ago
AirBaltic is in talks with labour unions to come to an agreement on an "adjustment in the workforce" as the Latvian carrier announced its bankruptcy to restructure its debt and survive a deepening sector-wide crisis brought on by the Iran war.

Other airlines and hospitality companies like Etihad Airways said their passenger-carrying capacity is running above year-earlier levels as Gulf carriers rebound from disruption.

WATCH MORE: https://thestartv.com/c/news
SUBSCRIBE: https://cutt.ly/TheStar
LIKE: https://fb.com/TheStarOnline

Category

🗞
News
Transcript
00:08Why we have chosen chapter 11 as the right method for us?
00:13Most of the targets that we are now working on are very international in nature.
00:18With chapter 11 we have a method that will actually enable us to deal with all of these issues.
00:31Let's go, what's that?
00:56My main message here and today is that there is no interruption or any changes for the
01:02air Baltic operations because of the chapter 11 filing so we will continue business as usual
01:07and on the latter point you made we are obviously very happy to have found a good consortium of
01:14financiers who really believe in our plan and are ready to engage with us so we are really looking
01:20forward to the next steps. The war in Middle East has been a huge curveball for the whole industry
01:25and the impact has really come in in two ways. First in the early stages of the war we had
01:31big
01:32big shutdowns in our traffic so air Baltic was operating scheduled flights to Dubai and also to
01:38Israel and all of that was shut down for a couple of months right after the start of the hostilities
01:45but obviously thereafter the industry has been hit with soaring high fuel prices and that really has
01:53been hurting everybody. We have already announced our schedule for next summer season so summer of
01:5827 and then you can see that there's definitely no revolution there so the adjustments we have made
02:05are fully in line with our new business plan and really the underlying philosophy for the scheduled
02:10traffic is to have a more focused network so instead of having a very big number of destinations
02:15when some of the destinations are only being operated like twice a week we're going to have higher
02:20higher frequencies and a more focused network. We are back on track we are right now in terms of capacity
02:30seat kilometers 15 to 17 percent more than one year ago so we're the only airline in the Middle East
02:37that is flying 15 to 17 percent more than one year ago flights are full full full we had in
02:44August 92 percent
02:45load factor so we're aiming at be we're aiming at 87 plus for the remaining of the year average fare
02:53about
02:54the same as last year so when cargo is booming so we we're in a good position from a revenue
03:01perspective
03:01when you talk about geopolitical tension it's not only in the UAE you have a global situation I mean the
03:08the decisions that the US and Canada are taking visas it's expecting impacting us here we see less traffic from
03:15India to Canada in students we see less traffic traffic from India into the US in terms of students
03:23so the world is bigger than what you think we think right the most important things for an airline is
03:30actually to adapt and adjust based on these shifts and we do that very quickly we've seen the pickup so
03:36the pickup has come back due to the conflict in the beginning it was dramatic but we've seen a pickup
03:41coming in that pickup is coming from the CIS from India from the local GCC countries and we see a
03:49little bit of Chinese coming in there so that's positive signs that's positive signs and that means
03:54that our occupancy is probably around between five and seven percent of where it should be so we're very
04:00excited about that demand is shifting so we see more late booking so I strongly recommend to buy early
04:05whoever buys early is going to get a great price because we see a lot of closing demand we see
04:10a lot of
04:10corporate coming to Abu Dhabi actual corporate traffic right now to Abu Dhabi is more than a year ago
04:17so but demand is shifting and we see more closing but winter is looking good
Comments

Recommended