DOMESTIC air fares are high but there are reasons for the high costs, says Fiji Airways Group chairman Nalin Patel.
Responding to Parliamentary Standing Committee member Parveen Kumar’s question on whether domestic fares could be decreased, Mr Patel highlighted several challenges of operating local flights.
“One of the challenges for us is domestic travel is very complicated for us at Fiji Airways and reasons are because each airport is different,” he said.
“In other words, if you go to Savusavu, you can’t take ATRs because of the airport. And if you go to Lakeba it is a different type of aircraft.”
Mr Patel said an airline’s costs reduces if they operated one type of aircraft for every airport which was not the case for airports in Fiji.
“We recognise that the domestic fares compared to type international fares are high.
“The challenge for us is to get the frequencies up and to bring in efficiencies in that sense.
“But if you look at Labasa, we have invested in the new ATR-72s and we are supposed to take 70-odd passengers, but we are restricted because of the runway issues to 40 or 50 passengers.
“So what it does is your constraint is whilst you have the seat capacity, fares could come down if you got the full down and frequencies.
“And also, we also need to do night flying and because of the size of the runway and like we have said safety will not be compromised.
“So therefore effectively there is virtually no night flying in all of these areas.”
He said the cost could come down if the aircraft is in the air.
“If it is parked it does us no good because it is incurring cost but not earning revenue.
“So the more we fly, more passengers it will carry, and the pricing will come in but having said that these are our challenges and that’s some of the reasons the airfares are high.”
Mr Patel added they were working closely with organisations such as Fiji Airports and the Civil Aviation Authority of Fiji to address these challenges.