This poor response to calls and emails, or lack of as the case may be, is unfortunately probably by design. I hope the ones that are brave enough to answer the phone get a special Covid19 subsidy for the extra work related stress atm!
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LOL I suspect you are absolutely right.
Flying is now something to be "endured" rather than enjoyed. If one is endure the whole thing one might as well minimise the price. Auckland to Queenstown on JetStar for as little as $56 each way, BYO gloves, hand sanitizer, face mask, drink, snack and magazine is probably about as good as flying gets these days.
Yeap, I just had a look for mid September. These guys are cheap. Leave your booking until August if you're going in Sept. I got a current model Toyota Corolla for just over $30 a day last year.
https://www.gorentals.co.nz/
www.jetstar.com
Glad to see I'm not the only one who's confused.
One thing I will say is the way Air NZ have carried on with delaying refunds, forcing people to rebook at higher cost etc has really put me off them. Pre Covid I flew a fair bit for work ... was a real eye opener to look back in my Xero on the last FY and see just how much I've given them (all those 5.30am CHC - AKL really add up!).
I will admit that I overspent on flights when I could have flown Jetstar for cheaper (or Qantas/Virgin/Emirates trans tasman) because I liked the lounges, the frequent flyer points, the status upgrades etc ... fool me once, right? I was a bit suckered in by the 'prestige', as it were. I'd book the premium seat for $10 extra ... because who doesn't want that bit more leg room, or I'd pay for the Works when flying to Aussie.
Although my flying is unlikely to return to the quantity it had pre-Covid, I'm now going to go with whoever is the cheapest that fits my schedule.
As others have pointed out, flying is likely to be a lot more 'grim' of a prospect in the near future. Queue up, get on board, sit there in your seat ... all that matters when the added extras are removed like meal service etc then is just the price.
Furthermore, I've been appalled at the way some members of my family have been treated trying to get refunds. I've got a couple of relatives who had a big overseas trip booked, have been promised refunds and nothing after weeks - they are out of work now so could really use the money.
lets be frank the stated numbers are just numbers and the layoff process is going to continue on and on. After they;ve laid off heaps of the frontline staff, they'll suddenly find they have too many middle managers , and the flight planning will be a whole lot simpler so wont need so many there either.... that department doing iata stuff wont have many internationals anymore so no complex calcs to refund portions of the ticket prices etc etc ... but of course they cant do it all at once and also lets be realistic you cant have cabin crew picking up the phones ....
For multiple reasons, I hate shorting, but I am so, so, so tempted.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/...ectid=12333532
Union's and staff appear to have no understanding of the business or the rate at which it is burning through cash. You'd be forgiven for thinking the unions want the consultation process to drag on almost endlessly.
Its very difficult to short AIR now. Not sure if Beagle still is or not.
The CMC platform is now only allowing positions to be closed out with AIR
At first they stopped you shorting it and now they're bailing from it being one of the stocks they offer even for longs. Makes you wonder why huh?
Please bear with me and I will keep things brief (ish)
I can say that the Union and the company both have very clear understandings of what is transpiring and what the end game will be - as do the staff.
Staff, in this case older wide body Long Haul crew, are very aware of how this business runs - it may suprise people just how heavily invested staff are in this company, the sense of pride and ownership should be very evident and to boot there are a whole lot of employee/shareholders in this company.
Being an employee/worker doesn't preclude one from being a shareholder and Air NZ has a large number of employee shareholders (not via incentive schemes and the like). They are not mutually exclusive.
In essence the issue of the protracted wrangling over redundancies is simple and here it is.
In 2014 (or 13) Air NZ threatened the union with outsourcing its entire wide body crew resource. So essentially all crew were to disestablished and those who accepted new contracts with vastly reduced term/ conditions and salaries would be taken back on. The company stated it wanted $6 million PA from the workers.
Essentially a massive 6 million dollar a year transfer of wealth (wages) from workers to shareholders (dividends) - don't get me wrong I owned plenty of shares over these years.
In order to avoid outsourcing the Union agreed to Air NZ's second plan which was to keep all wide body Long Haul existing crew (to which the then new CEO Christopher Luxon famously stated were legacies of the past) on their current contracts but in order to keep that they needed to agree that any new crew member employed forthwith would go onto a new schedule contract - the same vastly reduced terms and conditions and salary as originally proposed in the outsource proposal. The poison was swallowed.
The two groups would be kept separate, The existing crew would operate only on 777 200 and 777 300 aircraft and the new crew group would operate exclusively on the new 787 aircraft. Both crew groups would have vastly different contracts with the contract for each crew group running to 169 pages and within those 169 page contracts were multiple sub clauses affecting different ranks - believe me it was and is a deeply detailed document.
The issue has now arisen whereby some 1500 or so crew need to be put off yet the contracts Air NZ and the Union at the time have now proven to be unbelievably contradictory and almost impossible to reconcile. You can drive a very very wide bus through the loopholes and now you have multiple groups and ranks within groups at each others throats defending their legal interpretations of why their group must remain and another group be made redundant.
The Union itself (though this union ETU inherited the bulk content of these contracts from the previous union FARSA) is at high risk of being sued by it's constituent member groups who have lawyered up. The Union like the company is completely tied in legal knots and QC's are now involved - this is a case where the company got too clever in 2014 and tore the crew apart and put in place what they thought were smart contracts.
The price they pay now for getting those annual $6m wage savings is the pain now that all suffer with these convoluted and completely contradictory contracts - I have seen them they are utterly open to challenge on so many levels and are in fact the subject of three legal challenges and more to come.
It is not the the company, the union or the staff are necessarily slowing things down it is a function of god awful contracts.
However this week the redundancy calls are being made en masse and the company has acceptable that the inevitable post redundancy legal challenges will roll in.
My disclosure:
I was but am no longer a shareholder in ANZ
I was made redundant by them yesterday.
It's been my beloved career and I mourn it deeply.
Life goes on.