United Airlines working with Air New Zealand on Aotearoa expansion

United Airlines, now the biggest airline in the world, is working on increasing services to New Zealand.

The airline’s senior vice president of global network planning and alliances Patrick Quayle is in Auckland talking to joint venture partner Air New Zealand as it looks to expand its operation here.

It currently flies daily between Auckland and San Francisco during summer and three times a week during winter.

With Air New Zealand, it is facing increased competition to the United States with Delta starting daily flights between Auckland and Los Angeles next summer and Qantas flying non-stop between Auckland and New York from mid-June.

The United alliance with Air New Zealand is more than 20 years old and there is industry chatter that extra flying could be to supplement the Kiwi carrier’s operations to the US. Air New Zealand flies just three times a week between Auckland and Chicago – United’s home base.

Quayle would not reveal where United could expand.

“I don’t want to announce any new routes but there’s a number of opportunities to increase services between New Zealand and the United States.”

Last year the airline outlined a giant order of 100 Boeing 787 Dreamliners, with options for 100 more. Using Boeing 777-200s on the Auckland route were ideal because United’s existing Dreamliners were being used on longer routes, Quayle said.

He said when more of the new planes became available, it was likely they would be used to fly to New Zealand.

Quayle spoke at an AmCham NZ (American Chamber of Commerce in New Zealand) breakfast function where he was asked whether Auckland-Denver could be on the radar. He ruled this out because the “Mile High City” was too difficult to operate fuel-laden long-haul planes out of the high altitude and thin air, especially in summer.

The operational difficulties meant they had to carry fewer passengers, making the services uneconomic.

Patrick Quayle, vice president, international network and alliances, United Airlines. Photo / Grant Bradley

Air New Zealand was an important partner for United on US routes, he said.

“We’re constantly evaluating things, we’re looking at how we can stitch the network together better.”

Quayle said United was able to spool up quickly from the depths of the pandemic because it didn’t retire any of its fleet and kept pilots current with their training.

“We kept our entire fleet intact – we did not retire any aircraft. Most of the other airlines around the world retired portions of their fleet,” he said.

Some planes were parked up in the desert but none were sold or scrapped.

He said United took a punt on the international market coming back strongly out of the pandemic. It was an approach that could be used throughout business, he said.

“When everyone around the world is turning right, sometimes it’s best to turn left. That’s what we did.”

Air travel was difficult because many other airlines were struggling to bring planes and crew back quickly enough.

“We kept all our pilots employed in the seat they were last in - it was a very different strategy.”

United was now the biggest carrier across the Atlantic and the Pacific.

“We’re the first airline since Pan Am in the 1980s to be the largest airline across the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean,” he said.

Early in the pandemic the number of international services dropped to as few as 10 a day but Quayle played a leading role in rebuilding the network in existing markets and also expanding into new ones in Africa and the Middle East.

With historic data on route performance irrelevant because of the pandemic, United had to be nimble and look for new opportunities.

He said the demand for premium parts of the cabin was still strong after a surge when border restrictions eased. “New Zealand traditionally has been a back cabin market, it’s not traditionally a premium heavy market. What we’ve seen during the pandemic is that people value being back in the sky.”

“If we look at bookings now, the front cabin is packed.”

He believed demand would hold up, even if the economy soured.

The impact would be felt more by home supply stores rather than the airline and hotel sectors as there was still pent-up demand to reconnect and travel.

In spite of sharp rises in the airfares during the past 18 months, Quayle said air travel was good value and in real terms lower cost than it had been historically. “I really can’t comment on pricing. I can just tell you airfares are tremendous value. If you look at inflation-adjusted airfare, going back 20-30 years it is something like 40 per cent cheaper.”

United is getting Dreamliners and it is also the first airline customer for the supersonic Boom, a smaller version of the Concorde which could fly at the end of the decade or into the 2030s.

It will halve flight times but New Zealand is not in the mix for destinations. “That’s going to be more of a New York to London, New York to Paris-type airplane,” he said.

Another possibility was San Francisco to Tokyo where there would be similar demand from customers willing to pay a “huge premium” for speed.

“It just simply doesn’t have the capability to get to New Zealand or Australia,” he said.

Quayle first came to New Zealand 22 years ago as a backpacker with “$100 in his pocket”. Now a key executive in the world’s largest airline, he told AmCham members that although someone may be a backpacker, they could follow a similar path.

“It’s really important to embrace youth, those who are different from us and look and act differently to us because that is the future.”