Nicholas Panza, VP of the Americas - Air Tahiti Nui
On Tuesday, November 23rd, I had the privilege to interview Nicholas Panza. Mr. Panza is currently Vice President of The Americas at Air Tahiti Nui. He has been in the aviation industry for over 40 years, working for Trans World Airlines (TWA), Korean Airlines, Air Pacific (now Fiji Airways), and Air Tahiti Nui. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joshua Kupietzky: What is your background in the aviation industry?
Nicholas Panza: I've been in aviation for over 40 years. When I was going to college, I needed a part time job and was hired by TWA working in their reservation center. And that's where I started in the aviation business many years ago.
JK: How and when did you start considering aviation as a full time career option?
NP: Once you get into aviation and you start to learn about it and appreciate the very wide view that it has on the world you can’t stop. Aviation almost more than anything else connects people of different nationalities, different backgrounds, and different ethnicities. It's just an incredible eye-opener to understand different cultures, different countries, and different people, etc. So once you’re into it and have that exposure, it's incredibly fascinating, intellectually very stimulating, and you want to remain in it.
JK: How did you make your way to Air Tahiti Nui?
NP: It's a bit of a winding road, but not too much. I had several years at TWA, and I left them to join Korean Airlines. I worked with Korean Airlines for a number of years, and from there I went to an Australian company selling tour packages—that brought me into the South Pacific. I worked first for an airline called Air Pacific which is the Fijian airline. And after 15 years there, Air Tahiti Nui had just opened—it was a new company and they were looking for expertise in the North American market—and I joined them.
JK: Now is perhaps the most difficult time in the history of aviation. What do you see as your top challenges and opportunities? And how do you think Air Tahiti Nui will navigate out of the COVID crisis?
NP: Certainly, the COVID crisis has been the most difficult environment to operate in during my career, and that includes the Gulf War and SARS, H1N1 etc. So, undoubtedly, for the travel industry as a whole this has been an incredibly tough challenge. Like so many companies, revenue flow has been impacted, flights have been cut back, etc. But what I can say is the worst is behind us. Last week we resumed our flights among Tahiti, Los Angeles and Paris. And we've been flying between Los Angeles and Tahiti for most of this year. What we've noticed in the consumer market is that luxury travel is a segment of the business that is doing very well.The affluent segment, people who have the money and the time, have been looking for destinations which are open, and the Islands of Tahiti have been open. So we have a good number of visitors coming back to our islands. The month of November we're quite full; the same in December. And the outlook for 2022 is very positive indeed.
JK: How have bookings been with Air Tahiti Nui? And are you starting to see a bounce back in the airline industry?
NP: Generally, bookings have been very good. We were impacted by the Delta variant of COVID, and there was an outbreak in the Tahitian islands in August and September. We had a very strong June and July. August and September were very heavily booked, but with the Delta outbreak, those two months dipped. October was a recovery month, and now for November and December we're very heavily booked. And we're looking forward to continued growth as we get into 2022.
JK: Is there a plan for Air Tahiti Nui to mandate vaccines for employees? And will you eventually require all passengers to be vaccinated to fly with Air Tahiti Nui?
NP: We fly from Los Angeles to Tahiti, which is French Polynesia, and in order to go to Tahiti, you must be vaccinated. If you're not vaccinated, you cannot go for the purpose of tourism.. So essentially everyone who gets on the airplane from Los Angeles to Tahiti is fully vaccinated. Likewise, going from Los Angeles to France, France also requires vaccination. So we fly from LA to Paris, but unless you want to go into quarantine on arrival in France, you need to be vaccinated. For those reasons, basically all of our passengers are vaccinated. In regards to the airline staff being vaccinated, most are vaccinated. Here in North America, all of our staff are vaccinated, and most of the crew are fully vaccinated by this point in time.
JK: Currently Air Tahiti Nui only serves Los Angeles in North America. Are there plans to expand that to maybe San Francisco or Phoenix in the near future?
NP: At the present time, there is not. Tahiti is what we would call, in airline terms, a long-haul thin route. So by that, we mean that—long haul—it's an eight hour flight, so it's further than any domestic flight. And it's a thin route in that from North America there's no more than 80,000 people a year going to Tahiti. So on a daily basis, you're talking about only 500 people going. So it's a very thin and narrow route. As such, from an economy of scale point of view, it makes sense just to stay focused on the one departure point which is Los Angeles.We work closely with American, Delta, and Alaska Airlines, with whom we have prorated and codeshare agreements. And those three airlines feed us passengers from all over the United States. And in Canada, we work with Air Canada to feed passengers in from Canadian cities to Los Angeles. So economically, it's a very logical and useful model for us to adopt.
JK: Are most passengers coming to Tahiti from France or from Los Angeles? And which is the most profitable sector of the Paris to Tahiti route: Los Angeles to Tahitit or Paris to Los Angeles?
NP: The North America to Tahiti route provides the most overseas visitors into the Tahitian Islands—around 80,000 a year. Coming from France the number is around 40,000 to 45,000, and then another 10,000 or 15,000 from the rest of the EU countries. So the LA to Tahiti route is a strong one in its own right. And the Paris to Tahiti route is equally strong with the French and European market. The difference between the two markets is that from North America, the traffic tends to move a little bit more evenly throughout the year. In the first quarter of the year—January, February, March—it's a bit softer than the rest of the months, but the visitor arrivals are still quite strong. Whereas in the European market, they tend to travel in June through October, and then over Christmas. So it's much more seasonal, and we adjust our capacity according to that seasonality, whereas the US to French Polynesia is more evenly distributed throughout the year, and thus air capacity is more evenly distributed throughout the year.
JK: Previously Air Tahiti operated the Airbus A340 and then you made the switch to the Boeing 787. Why did you choose the 787 instead of the A350? And are there plans to stay with the 787 or do you plan to fly a different aircraft in the future?
NP: The 777 and the 787 are tremendous aircraft. And the A350 is a great airplane. With the 787 we have the dash 900. It's not as heavy an aircraft as the A350 and the standard A350 has a little bit higher capacity. When we did our route analysis, we wanted to have one aircraft that could fly all of our routes, and the Tahiti to New Zealand route is only five hours, and it's not as big as the LA to Tahiti route. So the A350 would never have worked on a route like Papeete to Auckland, but the 787 is a lighter aircraft, we have fewer seats to sell on that aircraft than we would on the A350, and the delivery time was a lot earlier for us than the A350. So with those things considered, the 787 fits on our route map because it's got great efficiency in terms of fuel burn; it’s a state of the art aircraft;and it works well for our network. It was a very good delivery.
JK: What makes Air Tahiti Nui different from other carriers that serve the French Polynesian market?
NP: Air Tahiti Nui is an immersive airline. And what we mean by that is the moment you see our airplane—just looking at the livery of our aircraft—it's far different than anything else. We have the various blue colors of the lagoons of Tahiti. We have the tiare flower on the tail, which is a national symbol; it's a Tahitian gardenia. We have various Tahitian tattoos on the fuselage— the whale, the albatross, the turtle—and each of these represent a different aspect of Polynesian mythology. So when you come onto the aircraft and you enter into it, the color scheme is bright blues and teal, yellow pillows, greens. From the minute you're on board, it is not some boring gray or dark blue. It is beautiful, uplifting, and energy-filled, reflective of the beauty of the Tahitian islands. Our crew are all Polynesian. When the plane takes off, the ladies change into a beautiful long Tahitian gown. The men have a Tahitian shirt on. The minute that you come on board the aircraft, you're given a Tiare flower, which is the flower on the tail. The minute you are on board you feel like, “I'm in Tahiti already. My vacation has already begun.” So while other airlines may be more of a commodity—you know thousands of seats to sell—it's the same old same old. It's a very special, unique experience on Air Tahiti Nui, and that is what differentiates our airline and our product from all other airlines.
JK: Air Tahiti Nui, like most airlines, has retooled its route network since the pandemic began. What has worked, and what hasn’t? Do you see your network skewing more heavily toward leisure/visiting friends and relatives or business as the airline emerges from the crisis? What lessons has the pandemic taught Air Tahiti Nui about network planning and the mix of leisure and business flying?
NP: For Air Tahiti Nui, we're primarily a leisure airline. Tahiti is a vacation destination. So we’ve never had a high element of business traffic. Having said that, there is a little bit of business and institutional traffic between France and Tahiti. But that market is more a combination of VFR [Visiting Friends and Relatives] visiting friends and relatives and summer vacationers, so we're largely a leisure airline. And the fact of the matter is during COVID there was no business traffic. People who were going or traveling anywhere were people who wanted to get away from COVID and go on vacation. So in that respect, you've seen more of the large US domestic legacy carriers suddenly say, oh, yeah, we need to fly to more leisure destinations, whereas for Air Tahiti Nui that has always been our niche, and that remains our niche. Like everyone during COVID, we had to curtail our flying. Japan has been closed. New Zealand and Australia have been closed. And both of those destinations have not yet reopened. So we probably will not start flying there again until April of next year. And the lessons learned going through COVID are basically the same as everyone's.We've all had to reduce our costs and that’s primarily through labor costs, because a lot of the aircraft are fixed costs with lease agreements.Your other major cost is fuel. And with the downturn in worldwide economies, fuel prices dropped, plus none of us were flying the full schedule. So for one of your three major cost elements of an airline—fuel—prices have dropped dramatically. With aircraft ownership leasing, they did not drop as much. And on manpower, everyone reduced their staffing levels during COVID, and we are all starting to come out of that just now.
JK: What are your long term goals for your aviation career?
NP: I have been in this business for a long time now. So my goal is to see Air Tahiti Nui return to normal operations during 2022. And that's what I would say is both the short term and long term goal for my career.
JK: We started off by talking about your background in the aviation industry. What advice do you have for young people trying to start a career in the aviation industry?
NP: My advice is this is a great time to get into the aviation industry. If you want to get into the flying side of it, there will be a lot of job positions coming up in the cockpit crew. So there's never been a better time if any young people want to pursue that side of the business. Go to flight school. Go into the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, or the Marines where there's great opportunities in aircraft cockpits. If you want to be on a different side, the commercial side of the business, airlines are hiring right now. I started my career as a reservation agent. Like anything, to be successful you work hard, you learn as much as possible as fast as you can, and you take advantage of opportunities. As they say, success is a residue of hard work, and you have to put that hard work in. This is a business that offers great opportunities, especially at this time.
