Norwegian has experienced rapid growth from the UK in recent years, both in the frequency of its flights to and from Scandinavia, and its development of its Gatwick base to fly long-haul to the US.
Tom Otley caught up with the airline’s chief commercial officer to discuss its expansion of the corporate market, Gatwick and aircraft reliability...
What percentage of your passengers from the UK are business travellers?
TR: It depends on how you define it. A lot of our business passengers buy a low-cost ticket, so we don’t know the percentage. If we had to guess it would be around 10 per cent, I think, but it depends on the route, looking at our frequency into Scandinavia it’s higher, because we fly five times a day to Stockholm and Copenhagen and three times to Oslo so you will see a slightly higher percentage of business traffic there than some of the long haul routes.
We have a sales team in London now and they are targeting small and medium size corporates trying to get them on board, but you need frequency to attract business customers, and that’s not done overnight.
Gatwick is a slightly constrained airport in terms of runway slots. There aren’t that many available slots at the moment. We fly daily to New York. We started at three a week. As soon as we added the daily service we were much more visible in the GDS and the travel trade started to fill up our premium cabin.
We see business traffic to the west coast, where we are five times a week to Los Angeles, and then there is Boston which is four times a week. These routes are served with B787-8 and B787-9 aircraft, and when we receive new Dreamliners you will see an increase in frequency on our existing routes as well as new routes. New York will be double daily from next year, and we will be daily on Boston and Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Are you confident you can fill your premium class cabin?
TR: Yes. The demand is there. The different in price between our premium and business class is so huge. We also offer lounges – so at JFK we fly into Terminal 1 and [for departures] we are using the Korean Air Lounge. At Los Angeles it’s the Oneworld lounge, and is included in the premium class ticket price. At Gatwick we use the No 1 Traveller lounge.
From a passengers’ point of view, what’s the advantages of Gatwick?
TR: Gatwick is much easier and faster than Heathrow. You don’t have to stand in line at security in fast track. It’s not as fancy as Terminal 5. And BA has added a New York service from Gatwick this summer.
But what about connecting traffic?
If you look at our own network, I would say between 30 and 40 percent of our traffic is connecting and coming from either Scandinavia or Spain - Barcelona and Madrid, where we have a double daily service. Those connecting passengers are through tickets and with luggage through-checked. And Gatwick has Gatwick Connect where you can collect your luggage, but it means Gatwick acting as an OTA (online travel agent).
Will you be able to continue to expand at Gatwick?
TR: Today we have ways of getting slots at Gatwick. In the future, we may have to buy them from other airlines. Hopefully airlines may move out of Gatwick to Luton or Stansted, for instance, which will free some up.
The way we have achieved is applying, taking what we can get and then rearranging our flights to make it work. We can grow with two aircraft each year. We have four carried million passengers through Gatwick last year.
Why not have your own lounge?
TR: It’s a possibility but at the moment we are not looking and we use No. 1 Lounge. If flying economy you can buy lounge access via Norwegian Reward and get cashpoints and a cheaper price.
Average load factor on the long-haul network is plus 90 per cent throughout the year. It’s not a secret that we are filling the aircraft.
Reliability?
TR: I don’t think we have cancelled many flights. We have serious delays because we don’t cancel them. The thing we do also is we do a lot of wet leases when there’s an issue with an aircraft. It’s a start up issue.
Not having a long-haul fleet to start with, has in the past caused us to wet lease other aircraft – Boeing, Airbus to cover the flights. So we use Hi Fly on Europe, for instance, but that was quite a long time ago, the last time it happened. There is always recovery in the programme, so if you have a seven day week you will have one day recovery throughout the network.