Airlines in a Crisis

How can an airline that claims to be international decide not to sell seats to parts of their market based on the nationality of the potential customer phone number. Flyr have made it extra difficult for people to register for their app or on their website. I am sick of telling them which pictures have dolphins or confirming I'm a human just to come to a page where they want to send a code to my phone number. And even though Ireland shows up in the list no code ever arrives. One wonders how many other countries in Europe or indeed the world this is the case for. Flyr is very friendly with Vipps, a Norwegian payment service, and Vipps is an upshot of the norwegian bank DNB. I have been in contact with DNB and they confirm they don't send such messages to Ireland and one is therefore inclined to think Flyr uses their service for this.  One thing is to list countries where you don't actually provide the service. Something else entirely is that the only alternative is to regist...

Pandemic started norwegian airline Flyr had a quick change of CEO yesterday as original CEO Tonje Wikstrøm Frislid surprisingly quit and was replaced by another ex-Norwegian Brede Huser previously CFO of Flyr. Flyr has had a torrid time financially this autumn after commiting to more planes and brand new ones to that, last January. Planes they haven't been able to fill or wetlease out this winter, and no summer profit to boot. They are down to only flying 6 of the 12 planes in the fleet, laying off a number of pilots and other staff.. A failed recapitalisation replaced by a speculative investor lead one, with billions of shares at share price 0.01 nkr, didn't help. Share price has fallen to a fraction of even that leaving litle hope of success for future planned capital repairs. Management mostly consisting of ex-Norwegian leaders laid of during the pandemic and reconstruction of that airline. Speculation is they won't be able to handle a nkr 100 million CO2 tax due to the ...

SAS monthly traffic numbers for August show low utilization of fleet and no growth. Werf says he see positive results in forward bookings but don't verify it with any numbers. And it certainly don't show in the publicised actual traffic numbers. SAS should say something monthly about freight because that is one of the things that diffferentiate it from its Scandinavian competition and other European low costs. The freight market has been booming but SAS is consistently keeping mum about it. Since they went into Chapter11 I assume they haven't been  coining it from freight and instead have missed out on this massive opportunity. Despite me pushing it for 2 years now in both articles and comments. The announcement of reducing the offer on SAS Plus to a single food item and a single drink also do not point to a future of an upmarket offer for passengers either. The inevitable slimming down of its fleet will lower its stance as a netwrok airline and without it's real premiu...

An actual Chapter 11 because it was done in the US so they could continue flying with their subsidiaries and operate their bonus program. The cash situation in SAS must have been worse than previously announced because they have put all cabin crew on leave and are already scrambling to find a loan of 700 million dollars to help them through the reconstruction process. This must mean that most of the earlier announced 8 billion krona cash available was in reality prepayments from customers that is now running out fast as repayments for cancelled flights, and compensation because the non-flying wheren't notified 14 days in advance. How company management can prefer this process to a slower but still fully flying cost saving exercise is baffling. Or have they looked to much to what happened with Norwegian. Then they have forgotten that the Norwegian process happened in the middle of a pandemic where sources of refinancing where available from many sides and leasing companies where des...

SAS Forward plan is not going well. The savings they where to get from the pilots was just to big a hill to climb for the unions. Not only wouldn't SAS hire back direct 450 pilots let go under the pandemic. The company tried the ruse with som irish underling companies to hire further pilots on new contracts far from scandinavian union influence. A move that didn't work for Norwegian and now has ended in a total 3 country pilot strike for SAS. Even the last weeks of potential strike has probably brought new bookings down to near 0 because both sides have all the way talked about potential bankruptcy. And now when tens of thousands hollidaymakers every day is looking for alternatives in an already overfull market the SAS reliability it depended on for its necesseraly slightly premium prices is in the dumps. This is a case where all press is not good press. Wonder how Werf got on in negotiations between swedish, danish and norwegian dealbrokers, unionreps and SAS mgmt mainly repre...