Pacific Magazine > Daily News

Tahiti Carrier Looking For 'Sexier' U.S. Stopover

Monday: September 15, 2008

(Tahitipresse)

Air Tahiti Nui wants to replace its New York-Los Angeles-Papeete route with a new U.S. intermediate stopover that is "sexier, like Las Vegas," according to CEO Christian Vernaudon. He claimed that Los Angeles, the traditional U.S. gateway to Tahiti, is no longer in favor.

The airline is due to suspend non-stop Papeete-New York-Papeete flights after Oct. 24, resuming Papeete-Los Angeles-New York-Los Angeles-Papeete flights. The non-stop flights from and to New York were expected to resume early next year before Vernaudon's latest announcements on Sept. 11.

The weekly Tokyo-Osaka-Papeete route will be abandoned on Oct. 1 as scheduled. Air Tahiti Nui is planning to offer three weekly Tokyo-Papeete-Tokyo flights in 2010 with departure times geared to connecting flights from and to China, Vernaudon said.

The airline's backbone consists of flights to Tahiti from France, the U.S., New Zealand and Australia, he said.

While an ideal average passenger load factor for an airline is 80 percent, Air Tahiti Nui's is only 66 percent, Vernaudon claimed. The carrier is aiming for an average 75 percent load factor next year, he said.

However, the latest available statistics from the French Civil Aviation Office in Tahiti show that Air Tahiti Nui had an average passenger load factor of 71.5 percent for all of its flights through the first seven months of this year. The load factor is the ratio of all passengers carried to all available seats.

During that period Tahiti's carrier carried 67 percent of all 358,081 destination passengers in and out of Papeete and 100 percent of all transit passengers (11,066). Its 1,202 flights (600 arriving, 602 departing) represented 67 percent of all 1,897 regularly scheduled flights. And its 353,220 seats represented 69 percent of the 511,101 available seats on those flights

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