India’s demand was driven by visits to friends & family with 42,000 of the 87,000 arrivals being VFR.
Imogen Thornton, Head of South & Southeast Asia at Air New Zealand shares in an exclusive interaction with T3, “The Indian market has recovered well for us and the visitor arrivals from India into New Zealand are back up above where they were before pandemic. In the year end in April, we saw around 87,000 Indians traveling to New Zealand. For the year 2020, in April, we saw an arrival number of 62,000. Between ourselves and our joint venture partner, Singapore Airlines, we carried around 50% of that traffic.”
Thornton believes that the demand out of India was a lot of from the interest of visiting friends and family (VFR) in New Zealand, with around 42,000 of that 87,000 coming from VFR. “But we are seeing that the demand from India for leisure holidays is month-on-month increasing. In 2024, it was almost 23,000 Indian travelers visiting New Zealand for leisure holidays”, adds Thornton. According to Thornton, their current focus is on providing seamless connectivity for Indian travelers. She adds, “Our aim is to connect as many as Indians with New Zealand, for which we also worked closely with Tourism New Zealand to keep making the New Zealand holiday attractive to Indians.”
Talking about Air New Zealand’s advantage, Thornton adds that as an airline in New Zealand near to 30 international destinations and 20 domestic New Zealand destinations, makes one of the great reasons for traveling with Air New Zealand and Singapore Airlines. As once one gets to New Zealand one can connect to 20 destinations of New Zealand and others that no other airline can offer. In terms of the future growth, Air New Zealand is keen at listening to the customers and evaluating future routes. “We know that there is growth potential out of the Indian market, but at the moment we are focused at maintaining the current market share”, mentions Thornton.
When asked about collaborations with travel-trade, Thornton adds that in India market, existing partnerships are very important. “Singapore Airlines is collaboratively working with us to make sure that we are reaching and engaging with customers through both direct consumer channels and also through travel trade partners who are really a very important part of our presence in India.”
She further adds, “We are also working closely with Tourism New Zealand because it is important that we engage and inspire the Indian market about what they can experience in New Zealand.” Air New Zealand continues to see partnership activities as well as educate the agents and make sure the agents understand what the destination and the product offering is as well as do the broader and mass reaching activity to tell Indians what the destination has to offer.
