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Australia’s newest airline, Bonza, will cut five routes from its schedule less than six months into operations due to a lack of demand and reliability issues on its more popular routes.
Bonza’s chief commercial officer, Carly Povey, sent an open letter to customers on Thursday to announce the changes to its route map, which will come into effect next month.
New airline Bonza is cutting five routes and reducing the frequency of some of its other services.
The airline will also reduce the frequency of some of its other services due to insufficient demand to enable an additional weekly service on three of its strongest routes.
Povey told this masthead the airline had not taken the decision to reduce its route map to 22 destinations lightly, but said it was important to improve the experience of customers and be responsive to demand.
“It would be wrong and arrogant of me to tell you we haven’t learned things. We need to own where we can improve. When we began operations five months ago we said we care deeply about making sure we offer flights to areas which seek them, this is actually doubling down on that,” she said.
The 777 Partners backed airline will cut all services from the Sunshine Coast to Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, and Tamworth, as well as its routes from Cairns to Mackay and Toowoomba Wellcamp to the Whitsundays due to insufficient demand and a string of reliability issues. About 5000 customers have booked flights on these routes. The airline has committed to issuing refunds or providing an alternate flight with Bonza.
The carrier will also use the increased capacity to add a weekly flight from the Sunshine Coast to Albury, and the Sunshine Coast to Melbourne, as well as Melbourne to Port Macquarie.
Bonza’s chief commercial officer Carly Povey: “It would be wrong and arrogant of me to tell you we haven’t learned things. We need to own where we can improve.”
Bonza launched its ambitious plan to fly to largely unserviced parts of Australia with low-cost fares at the end of January. It is the first high-capacity, low-cost carrier to launch in Australia since now-defunct Virgin subsidiary Tigerair took off 15 years ago. It has positioned itself as a leisure carrier targeting tourism destinations in regional Australia, rather than competing with Qantas or Virgin, which service high-frequency routes.