On the other hand, Eurowings - the brand you all don't like but which is closer to the short haul reality of SN than many would like to accept, has over 20 planes leased for the summer schedule.Lux_avi wrote: ↑01 May 2024, 14:01Most of the wet leases agreements you are mentioning are caused by engine issues (mostly on the A220/E2/320-321NEO), late delivery of new aircraft & so on. Basically those wet leases are to cover the planned scheduled of those main carriers. Not to create extra capacity, unlike SN.Ge203 wrote: ↑01 May 2024, 10:51Mmmh, most of « full service carriers » go for wet leases. SAS long term agreement with CityJet. Lufthansa uses them as well this summer.longwings wrote: ↑01 May 2024, 07:37 Reliance on wet leases as a strategy concerns me not a little. This is not a strategy shared by the other (so-called) full-service carriers Brussels wants to compete with, and for a reason: pretty hard to maintain consistent hard/soft product standards. If wet leases are not strategically deployed, this could cost them frequent fliers.
Swiss wet leases Air Baltic aircraft, and quite a lot of them.
Air France signed an agreement for wet lease with ASL and Amelia. As they did last year with DAT.
British Airways will also use multiple operators on some of their services.
And the list goes on and on, probably.
Let's see things pragmatically - the business model fo the airline follows the customer demand. You can catch up some seasonality via maintenance, but not if peaks/lows are extreme.
Thus, there are two options :
- you design your own business model so that you have part time employees working mainly in the summer season or adjust the working schedules towards peaks in the summer season
- or you rent extra capacity from 3rd party which is able to place it's planes globally somewhere else in winter or simply puts them into storage
Whatever brings you better economics and less union troubles wins.
And there are of course permanent wet leases at the lower end of the market where you don't want to serve a certain segment - Swiss is using since ages Helvetic for 100 seaters.