21 November, 2017
Infare Analytics Team released a Case Study to find out if Norwegian Bet on low-cost, long‐haul flights has the potential to live up to the title of “Airline of the Year” granted by CAPA-Centre for Aviation.
Yet, Norwegian lacks permission to fly over Russia, which has a policy of only allowing one airline per country to fly over the “Siberian Corridor”. This was granted to SAS ever since a Soviet-era based deal in 1956. For the time being, Norwegian will then focus on bridging Europe and the U.S. with low-cost, long‐haul flights.
While being unquestionably daring, Norwegian’s strategy has to pay off from a revenue perspective to be a sustainable business model and not merely noise in the market.
Our Analytics Team has looked at Norwegian’s performance for the route London Gatwick (LGW) – New York J.F.K. (JFK) to establish whether the new strategy has been financially successful and to assess how it has affected the market.
Figure 1: Average fares on the routes LHR‐JFK (orange) and LGW‐JFK (blue) for 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.
Source: Infare Altus
Below you can find “The Norwegian Bet” Case Study.
Our Altus BI solution, which is based on a 1 trillion airfares database supported the analysis. Evaluations also factor in CASK value, seat capacity and load factors. What’s more, Norwegian’s low ‐ cost, the long-haul strategy appears to be impacting passenger demand on the route London Heathrow ‐ New York J.F.K.
To conclude, the “little-known” Norwegian airline might not be so little anymore thanks to the new “Airline of the Year” title. With its strategic focus on long-term goal and, here and now, multi-million dollar earnings, this discount carrier undeniably is setting its footprint in the market.