The recent CAPA Summit showcased many aviation hot-button issues. Panellist Leanne Geraghty, chief customer and sales officer, Air New Zealand, sat down with Travel Weekly for an update on how current challenges are being met.

Leanne Geraghty has seen much in her 30 years of travel, working her way up through a variety of roles that now put her in an ideal position to understand customer needs and wants, plus juggling four children in the process. The Australian-born former group general manager airports for the Kiwi national carrier had responsibility for more than 1,800 employees and operations across 50 airports internationally.

She now looks after 16.5 million customers (August 2023 – July 2024), up 4% from the year prior, who helped increase revenue by 11 per cent to $5.9 billion in the last financial year, driven by a 23 per cent ramp-up in capacity, primarily across the international long-haul network. And there is plenty more to come.

Business Premier Luxe.

Business Premier Luxe and long haul

As with many other airlines, Air New Zealand, the delivery of its new aircraft, was pushed backed by as much as two years. While it had already made a decision to move to a more premium, dense configuration on its new 787, those delivery delays meant the new Dreamliners would not be arriving until the end of 2025. So, the airline decided to bite the bullet and refit its existing 787s. It was a tough – and expensive – call.

“Our customers are telling us our product needs to be updated, and therefore we’ve made the decision to do the retrofit ahead of the new aircraft coming,” she says. “We will put the new cabin interiors throughout all of our 787s, the difference being that they won’t have the Skynest, but they will come with the Business Premier Luxe, which is the new business premier product that sits in the front row of the Business Premier cabin and offers more space, and a full sliding screen door. There’s a lot of features. It’s a much bigger area.”

The Skynest will only appear in new Dreamliners when they arrive at the end of 2025.

While the reconfigured Boeing 787s will include the new fitouts in each class, they will not feature the much-anticipated Skynest sleeper pods (pictured) that allow economy passengers a great deal more comfort in the form of bunk beds that will offer four-hour sleep windows on new long-haul flights to destinations, including New York and Chicago.

The six-bunk pods will be located between economy and premium economy cabins with passengers able to pre-book sessions for between NZ$400-$600. The cabin crew will have 30 minutes to change the bedding and refresh the pod after each use.

“The Skynest is really a product that premium economy and economy class passengers would purchase,” she says. “It came about through customers telling us that they wanted to be able to get rest and sleep, particularly on those really long-haul flights.

“That’s a solution to enable every single customer on our aircraft should have a lie-flat solution no matter what cabin they’re travelling in.”

The Skynests will include USB charging ports, a reading light, ear plugs, full-size sheets, a blanket, a pillow as well as seatbelts to make sure that the beds adhere to onboard safety protocols.

Meanwhile, Business Premier Luxe features include seats in a 1-2-1 configuration in a herringbone pattern, with all seats facing toward the aisle, seats 52cm wide, turning into 203cm lie-flat beds, a 60cm TV, USB-A, USB-C and AC power outlets, plus bluetooth audio. Business Premier will also feature a sliding shield that can be extended to provide extra privacy.

Connectivity for all

While many airlines still charge for Wi-Fi, Air New Zealand has long supplied connectivity to all passengers. That will be helped by the introduction of Starlink, already a feature on some other airlines, as well as cruise ships.

“We’ve had Wi-Fi on board for some years now, and we have literally provided free Wi-Fi to the entire aircraft on our international services where it’s available. The Starlink trial is really about getting greater bandwidth for customers,” Geraghty says.

“We’re trying to find a solution to be able to offer Wi-Fi domestically, and Starlink looks like it’s the potential to do the job for us, which would be fabulous, just in terms of the bandwidth it provides, which would enable the whole aircraft to do all sorts of things on personal devices.”

Next destinations

One topic of discussion that many at the recent CAPA Summit in Brisbane agreed on was the emerging international travel coming out of India, and the diaspora of Indians returning to the country.

It’s something that Air New Zealand, doesn’t want to miss out on, even though the national carrier, Air India, is expected to fill much of that demand with a whopping 470 planes on order and receiving one plane very six days.

“We saw quite a significant uplift in inbound customers coming into New Zealand (from India) coming out of the pandemic,” she said.  “It is a good market. We work really closely with SQ as an Alliance partner to serve the Indian market, but we do think down the track there may be an opportunity to maybe extend what we do there, but it’s at the moment one that we’re just really watching closely.”

But again, there’s a hurdle, this time in the form of the NZ Government raising the price of visas for Indian and Chinese visitors, plus there is the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy (IVL) which was ratcheted up from a relatively acceptable NZ$35 to NZ100.

“It just adds another layer of complexity” to the operation, she says.

“When you put it all together, then it’s the collective impact of those increases in terms of demand for people to come to New Zealand, because at the end of the day, we’re competing with other countries to attract the visitor. So, we’re just really mindful of what, what those increased fees do to demand.”

Air New Zealand will also restart its services into Korea three times a week, from the start of October, until March 2025.

As for struggling Pacific islands destinations, given the recent collapse of Air Vanuatu, Geraghty says that the airline understands its role in the region to maintain connectivity with widely dispersed communities such as those in Samoa, the Cook Islands, Fiji and Niue, which are currently available on the network.

“We’ve probably put about a 9 per cent increase of capacity into the Pacific islands, and that’s across a range of the PI locations that we fly to,” she says.

Leanne Geraghty on a panel at the recent CAPA Summit in Brisbane.

Working together on SAF

Discussions at the recent CAPA summit also focused on sustainable aviation fuel, and the possibility of the region being a hub of manufacture, give the availability of the feed stock used to make SAF, rather than sending the raw material offshore to be bought back at a significant cost.

Given many Pacific islands are copping the brunt of climate change, Geraghty said Australia and New Zealand had to bear some responsibility to work harder at a solution and make it readily available to those nations most affected. Fiji Airways announced yesterday that it had launched its own feasibility study.

Fiji Airways collaborates on feasibility study for SAF made from sugarcane

“Definitely there is a huge opportunity that exists for the region to work together,” she says. “I think there is a little bit of onus upon both New Zealand and Australia in the region to make sure that we’re doing the right things to support them and do what needs to be done to help them through the impacts of climate change.”

That also includes regulation to set a cost for SAF, with countries such as Singapore, already introducing a mandating 1 per cent SAF uplift for all carriers flying in and out.

Coming up with firsts is in the DNA 

For a carrier from such a small nation, Air New Zealand has always punched above its weight when it has come to innovation and international exposure. Geraghty, who has been with the carrier for 20 years, says it is in the DNA of the brand and its people.

“We talk about it frequently,” she says, warming to the topic. “We’ve always, in the almost 85-year history of the airline, you go back in time, and there’s been a whole lot of firsts.

“We were the first airline to boil water in the air. We were first to put self-service kiosks in. We were first with the sky couch to put a lie-flat solution in economy cabins. So, there’s a whole lot of firsts. The Skynest bunks are another first.

“It’s just inherent, it’s in the DNA of the organisation. When you join Air New Zealand, there is a mindset there of finding solutions to problems.”

It’s also well-known for its quirky safety videos, a new one which is soon to come out.

Air New Zealand chief hints at quirky safety video in time for Christmas

“Our brand personality has set us apart on the world stage over the years,” she says. “We are known for our tone of voice and our personality in the market. We’re a premium carrier, but we like to describe ourselves as premium with a wink.”

The job ahead

Retail transformation is the next challenge for Geraghty, in a long list of goals she is yet to achieve. But with technology moving so fast, it’s difficult to keep up, she admits, especially with aviation which has usually conducted business in a traditional way. But the next leap will wave goodbye to a long piece of card ejected from a machine with the transition into modern day retailing at your fingertips

“I would love to see that, because it’s going to be one of the biggest transitions the industry is going to go through in, you know, over 60 plus years, probably since the advent of e-tickets,” she says.

“The pace of technology, actually even coming out of the pandemic, it’s stepped up a notch even further. Now, I think it’s only going to go faster, not slower, but it’s finding the right tech to back and getting the right solutions in, I think, is half the mastery at the moment because there are so many new startups and new solutions available.

“(And) AI shifts everything to another level. It can be applied literally anywhere across the business.”

One AI initiative includes seeing what customers do and don’t eat on the plane and adjusting the menu accordingly.

All Blacks vs Wallabies

As for rugby teams, Air New Zealand is a major sponsor of the All Blacks, but Geraghty is an Aussie.

So, who does she barrack for?

Ever the diplomat, she says “I can either be torn or I can win either way. I look on the bright side.”

Feature image: Leanne Geraghty being interviewed by APAC Network’s Oriel Morrison at CAPA last week.