Kate Boyer: Air New Zealand General Manager on the airline dropping in the punctuality rankings

New Zealand airports and its national carrier may be suffering the winter blues in new data showing the punctuality of global air travel. 

The June figures base its rankings on flights arriving and departing within 15 minutes of schedule. 

Air New Zealand has dropped to tenth in the Asia Pacific region after sitting in the top five earlier this year. 

No airport in the country cracked the global top 20. 

Air New Zealand General Manager of Airports Kate Boyer told Heather du Plessis-Allan the seasons play a big part in this. 

She says it's impacted by the likes of de-icing, foggy days, and storms throughout winter. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Got some numbers for you on how Air New Zealand
is performing globally with its on time performance. Aviation analytics
company Syrium ranks airlines and airports for punctuality. Air New
Zealand is the tenth best in the Asia Pacific region.
Auckland Airports nowhere to be seen. This is for last
month only. KATEE Boya is a New Zealand's General manager
of Airports and with us high Kate.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Good morning, Heather, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Yeah, you're welcome. So you guys came in at seventy
eight point sixty one percent for punctuality, which is not bad,
but it is still one in five flights that are late.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Ah, it is Heather, And you know there's two things
I would say here. One is context really matters. So
our June performance is impacted by the fact that we
are in the middle of winter and what that means
is we're going to see d icing, significant fog days
and of course at the start of school holidays we
saw that massive storm which severely impacted the network all

(00:54):
over the country, but particularly the Tasmin and Marlboro regions.
We were third in May, we were top five in
jan and feb we are going to see some seasonality,
but that doesn't mean that we're happy with that performance.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Yeah, I see you. That second thing please, I.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
Was just going to say. The second thing is we
are so focused on turning around our on time performance.
We've heard our customers on this. It is so critical
that we deliver them safely and on time to their destination.
So we've been throwing the kitchen sink at this. Over
the last six months, we've improved our performance by six
points versus the prior six months, reduced cancelations from four

(01:34):
percent to two point eight percent, So that's really good.
We're really happy with that, but we have to keep
after it. We have to keep delivering for our customers.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
I see you guys had a little bit of fog
disruption just in the last few days in particular. Have
you managed to get your schedules back on track.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
We are getting back on track. Yeah. We saw Monday
severe disruption in Auckland from the fog and yesterday christ
Church was heavily impacted and those hubports go down Heather.
As you can imagine, the ripple effect through the network
is massive. So we are rebooking where you think our
new automated rebooking tool to get people back on flights

(02:11):
and back in the air again.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Now does it surprise you at all that Auckland Airport
hasn't made this list of punctual outfits.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Well, what I would say is that Auckland is going
to have some of the same impacts that we have
in terms of those weather disruption and some of that fog.
They are also going through major infrastructure works and that
can cause disruption. And we can see that there's tarmac
changes and that we are going to be continuing to

(02:40):
work with them on how we navigate those changes over
the next few years.

Speaker 1 (02:44):
That is very magnanimous of you. Thanks very much, enjoy
your time. That's Kboy who's in New Zealand's General manager
of airports out to that in Auckland Airport business. But
you know why they're not on the list because it's
a hellhole. Quite surprised to see went through the list.
Quite surprised to see actually the old South African airports
are not doing too badly. They're cropping up quite a lot.

(03:06):
Most the world's most on time medium airport Number five
is Joe Burgh Tambo International Airport, which actually when you
think about it. I don't know if you've flown through,
it is where you're gonna go. If you're gonna go
to Safari or anything like that, you're gonna go into
Joeburg's airport. It actually is quite efficient when you think
about it, and the most on time small airports Durban

(03:26):
comes in at number three and Cape Town comes in
at number five, so that's not half bad. Coma in Auckland,
you can't be beat Come on, Auckland, you can't be
beaten by South African airports. Have you seen this that
they don't even have power half the time in the country?
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