Hawaiian Airlines has announced that it is indefinitely suspending flights to Brisbane. The airline remains bullish on Australia, but it is evaluating its network and working to build back its international flying in a profitable and sustainable way. While Hawaiian’s network to Australia will only be down to one city, for now, this does not necessarily mean the airline will be entirely out of the Australian marketplace.
Hawaiian Airlines indefinitely suspends Brisbane
Hawaiian Airlines has pulled out of Brisbane (BNE). The airline first launched flights to Queensland’s capital in November of 2012. However, the airline suspended operations in March 2020 as a result of Australia’s restrictions on foreign travel. As the crisis unfolded, Hawaiian continued to move its Brisbane relaunch back and, very recently, officially pulled the city out of its schedules moving forward.
“This is a difficult decision but like many other airlines we find ourselves rebuilding our network in a vastly different operating environment,” said Andrew Stanbury, regional director of Australia and New Zealand at Hawaiian Airlines. There are several factors airlines are considering as they rebuild networks, but one of them includes looking at the new ways in which demand has returned. There are still some governmental restrictions in place that limit travel between the US and Australia.
Other executives at Hawaiian were also asked about Brisbane on the carrier’s fourth-quarter earnings call. Brent Overbeek, Senior Vice President of Revenue Management and Network Planning, stated the following on Brisbane on the call:
“We looked at the conditions that we thought were going to exist in the marketplace, particularly the international marketplaces that we serve. And while we certainly like flying to Brisbane and enjoy that, we were at the point where we were ready to move on. We don’t think the conditions in the short term are going to make sense for us.”
Hawaiian will continue to fly to Sydney (SYD), which resumed in December. The airline offers five-weekly services between Honolulu (HNL) and SYD using a 278-seat Airbus A330-200. Connections within Australia are available on Hawaiian’s codeshare partnership with Virgin Australia.
A new kind of network
Hawaiian Airlines faced a bit of a delay in the recovery due to its geographic orientation. Its home state did not reopen until the fall of 2020, and it lacked a mainland US marketplace that other major carriers had. Hawaiian’s main role is to connect people to Hawaii, with a few incremental connections across the islands and some transpacific connections on the margins.
As Hawaiian managed its network, it added two new long-haul routes. This includes new long-haul service from Honolulu to Austin, Texas, and Orlando, Florida. The airline has seen success in both markets, and it believes there is a lot of promise in both markets. However, this comes with some strain on aircraft.
Just in the way Hawaiian has scheduled its operations, the Austin and Orlando services require a significant amount of downtime on a few weekly operations to keep the crews and planes together. This requires a commitment of aircraft, of which only the Airbus A330 family of planes can serve, but Hawaiian’s A330 fleet is already well-committed. The airline has used the fleet to serve a variety of long-haul routes to Asia, especially to Japan, and domestic operations to places like Boston and New York.
Hawaiian is expecting to receive Boeing 787 Dreamliners. However, those planes, which were formerly due in 2021, have slipped into 2023 as a result of Hawaiian-initiated deferrals and, more recently, delays from Boeing as a result of rework they are doing in conjunction with regulators after finding some issues on recent Dreamliner builds. Without those aircraft, it does put a bit of pressure on Hawaiian’s long-haul network, though that is not the entire story on Brisbane.
Could Hawaiian come back?
Hawaiian is about to enter a new kind of phase of network planning. One of the silver linings coming out of the crisis is that the carrier has been able to benefit from some reduced lease rates on Airbus A330-200s, which make them more opportunistic, as Chief Financial Officer Shannon Okinaka discussed at Hawaiian’s investor event in December.
The question will be what other opportunities are out there for Hawaiian. China is an interesting market, and there are certainly other locations in East Asia with demand for travel to Hawaii, though not necessarily at yields that can support lease rates for a new Airbus A330-200.
This is more of a question for the long term and looking at what demand is like in 2023 and beyond. As Hawaiian has made clear, it is waiting to see what things look like in the international sphere before making some significant commitments to its network and growth. If conditions improve and the numbers work out, Brisbane could be back. But, for now, Hawaiian will keep serving Sydney and relying on Virgin Australia to keep other points in Australia on its route map.
