Full Video: Azul Brazilian Airlines CEO at Skift Aviation Forum 2022

25.08.2023 - 14:35 / skift.com / Latin America / Dawit Habtemariam / Airlines

Azul Brazilian Airlines doesn’t expect any ultra-low cost carriers to enter Brazil any time soon. The low cost carrier has 165 aircraft that fly to 170 destinations in Brazil and will flies just under 1000 flights a day next month.

Azul Brazilian Airlines CEO John Rodgerson said the unique attributes of Brazil will deter the entry of ultra low-cost carriers, discussed why only domestic airline consolidations make sense in Latin America, and detailed the returns on the carrier’s aircraft choices and post-pandemic recovery efforts, and more.

Watch this on-stage conversation between Rodgerson and WestJet Aviation Advisor and board member Alex Cruz about what it takes for a low-cost carrier to survive in Brazil’s aviation market. The full transcript is below.

Alex Cruz: All right. Well, good morning, everyone. We got a problem. Problem is lunch is next, so we really need to keep everyone super entertained.

As I was preparing to speak with you today, I thought that about nine years ago in a conference very similar to this one with a number of CEOs and industry experts, we went through a process of about one hour where the question was what is the best airline that we could build today together? And through a series of questions and surveys, we built one. And the answer was a low-cost carrier in South America that would have co-chairs and interlines and relationships with others. Here we are.

John Rodgerson: That’s it. We built it.

Cruz: Amazing thing. Right. So as we go along, perhaps a couple of things about Azul. Azul started as a really a true, I don’t know if I should use the word true, but as a low-cost carrier, very pure, simple to start with. But then it grew. It began to grow, it began to take on other aircraft types, began to relate to other airlines.

Tell me more about that evolution of the model. Because most people that start in that sort of truest of models, they try, or at least they tend to, want to stay there, or many of them do anyways.

Rodgerson: We found in Brazil, and I think this is for most part of the world, is that the market is big and diverse, right? And so when we went to Brazil, we saw nobody was flying Embraer aircraft, so aircraft that are manufactured inside the country. There was only about 40 cities served in a country that should have more than 200 cities served.

And so we started kind of flying these Embraer aircraft, opened up a lot more cities than our competitors did. And then we said, “Geez, there’s cities of 20 million people in Sao Paulo, 13 million in Rio, but there’s also cities of 200,000 people that don’t have air service and these are really wealthy cities.”

And so we diversified again and went down to turboprop aircraft where people just didn’t have access,