Airlines are determined to return to profitability – and restore COVID decimated balance sheets.

But they will not do it at the expense of travellers says Cath O’Brien, executive director of the Board of Airline Representatives New Zealand (BARNZ).

“Travellers are the life blood of airlines,” O’Brien says. “However, airlines businesses face just the same headwinds as consumers are right now with inflationary price rises hitting their budgets.

“Getting planes back into service and in the air, working with international airports to get slots to land,  and increased costs of staff and services on the ground are just some of the things that go into working out how much it costs to fly a jet from A to B and how much people should pay.”

Aviation journalist Grant Bradley said airlines were currently riding a pent-up demand for people to catch up with family and friends around the world. Air travel was seen as a “necessity” nowadays.  That was helping airlines bounce back to an operating profit.

Travel journalist Siobhan Downes reports Statistics NZ  index data for international air transport since 2014 showed that until COVID the cost of airfares has been decreasing overall year-on-year. But now they had taken off again.

One of the major problems was the availability of flights. A Flight Centre spokesperson told Downes that New Zealand was probably only at about 75% of the international capacity of pre-COVID.

The pressure on capacity means that travellers may not see the real cheap deals of pre-COVID for some time.

However, she says Patrick Quayle, United Airlines’  vice president of global network planning and alliances, made people think when he told Aucklanders that airfares are tremendous value: “Looking at inflation-adjusted airfares, going back 20-30 years, it is something like 40 per cent cheaper.”

“When I flew to Europe for my OE (overseas experience) more than 25 years ago, I paid around NZ$2000 for a return fare. These days it is still possible to get a return fare for this sort of money. And its cheaper again if you think about inflation over that time.

“It’s remarkable how competition has ensured airfares remain accessible for travellers,” O’Brien says.