Well, this is a bit of a shocker! ANA confirms all A380s to serve Hawaii market! That’s THREE A380s operating on a single leisure market!!
Tickets for ANA’s A380 service between Tokyo Narita and Honolulu have been on sale for a couple of weeks now. And for a slightly longer period of time, we’ve known that the carrier would operate at least two of these aircraft on this route by June 2019. However, ANA has three of these things joining the fleet, so naturally, we all wondered where that third aircraft would go. And, apparently, the answer to that question is Honolulu.
ANA Confirms All A380s to Serve Hawaii
Now, for a long time know, we’ve known that all three aircraft would be given the special Honu livery. So, it’s always been possible that all three aircraft would serve Hawaii. But that’s a TON of additional capacity! After all, the aircraft that currently serve the Honolulu-Narita route, the Boeing 787-9, can carry 246 passengers. The A380, on the other hand, has the capacity for 520 passengers. So, if the Airline flew three A380 flights per day, that would be 1,560 seats per day up from just 492 today!
But, apparently, that’s the plan. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports that Jun Miyagawa, ANA’s Senior Vice President of sales wants to become the number one airline serving the Tokyo-Honolulu market. Today, that market is dominated by Japan Airlines with a 32% share, followed by Hawaiian with a 22% share. For reference, Japan Airlines operates about four flights with around 1,000 seats per day between Narita and Honolulu with a mix of Boeing 767s, 777s, and 787s. And, in case you’re wondering, ANA says they have a 90% load factor today.
So, to get there, ANA plans on ramping up to 1,300 seats per day by 2020. And they’re going to accomplish this by starting service in May with a single A380. They’ll then ramp up to an additional A380 in June, and finally, the third A380 in 2020. Apparently, they aren’t operating all three A380s daily if they’re hoping to attain 1,300 seats per day, but still, all three will run on the same day at least a few days out of the week.
ANA Confirms All A380s to Serve Hawaii Market, Final Thoughts
It still boggles my mind that ANA is going to use these huge, expensive jets to serve Hawaii, especially since they’ll feature ANA’s first class suites and couch seats. Heck, ANA is even building the biggest lounge at Honolulu with direct jet bridge access to the upper deck of A380 for first, business, and premium economy passengers.
Begs the question, though, are these jumbos going to sit on the ground when not in use? We already know that the first flight is only going to operate on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays.
i was actually very impressed by ANA’s completely out of the box thinking (i never even thought of that scenario until their announcement) – it’s truly making lemonade out of lemons, when you have to factor in :
1. they were basically forced buying those planes from Airbus as part of the Skymark bankruptcy auction deal (DL said hell no to the planes). ANA basically factored the planes into the “cost per HND slot” type of calculation.
2. IIRC due to taxiway seperation, HND is not yet A380-certified, so ANA can’t run them on domestic trunk ops like HND-CTS, HND-FUK, or even HND-Okinawa.
3. they can’t fight the tide that business pax from regional biz destinations like PVG HKG SIN would all pick HND if possible. Seoul is completely non-starter here due to HND-Gimpo being far preferred over NRT-ICN.
4. they can run it to LAX, but with ANA DL AA all serving HND-LAX, the whalejet would go nowhere.
5. airlines are scraping frames cuz the lease-out/re-sell market has both poor returns and virtually-non-existent volume. the stalling of the EK rescue deal over engines over makes matter worse.
6. Historically, JAL’s relationship with tour agencies (and their own package tours) made them essentially the only game in town that mattered at all. ANA’s Hawaii service has always been “voting present”. Their new JV with Hawaiian only makes matters worse for all other marginal players. Go-big-or-go-dodo-bird.
7. And ANA traditionally hasn’t been much of a volume mover in terms of fascilliating INTL-to-INTL connections, and their extremely low density seating on long-haul 787s and 77Ws are testament to their desire to chase Japan-O&D, preferably the pointy end. So that rules out a major top up order to bring the fleet to critical mass (again, HND ironically being the curse here)
So …. ANA is faced with the dilemma that they must operate the 3 planes …. out of NRT … to somewhere that isn’t extremely lopsidedly favoring HND …
and have a huge existing PDEW (since the amount of demand-stimulation from 789s to 388s by a single airline is pretty much unfathomable …. sans EK / QR) ….
and the existing PDEW has to favor Japan being the O&D point instead of just a pass-through hub …
and that the decision will not be rapidly thrown out the window by the time more HND slots are available in anticpation of Tokyo 2020 Olympics …
with the side bonus of bringing themselves up to par with JL/HA competition in a single shot (which was close to impossible organically)
(And bear in the mind that with only 3 in the fleet, they can’t exactly afford to spread those across different routes.)
There’s no guarantee any of this will succeed at all, but it seems that they’ve made the best out of a horrible scenario. Yes hindsight is 20/20, but even till today, i have yet to come up with a better arm-chair idea than what ANA has announced.
All great points and ANA is definitely going big with its lounge at HNL with dedicated premium class access, etc. But more than doubling their available seats is, in my opinion, insanely risky, especially for a leisure market. Thus far, ticket prices for the initial A380 service is the same as their current 787 service. But, once the novelty of the aircraft fades, I think it’ll be difficult to maintain pricing, especially when we enter our next economic down cycle. And, yup, the JL/HA partnership is going to make things difficult for ANA, plus there’s the fact that JL also codeshares with Alaska. For this to work, I think ANA is going to have to strengthen its relationship with fellow Star Alliance partners to build feed for Honolulu/Tokyo. But even that… How many passengers originating in the US will want to connect in Honolulu to get to Tokyo? And how many non-leisure travelers from Asia will want to connect in Tokyo and Honolulu to get the Continental US?
I had read somewhere (?) that the initial focus and underutilization on NRT-HNL was part of becoming familiar with A380 operations and that although all three birds would service HNL, frequencies would be added KIX-HNL in addition to NRT-HNL, a route ANA currently doesn’t serve.
That said, Air Asia X, Scoot, Delta, Hawaiian, and JAL all serve the route, which leads me to wonder if there’s any market at all to be tapped.
We tried to book this route for our return flight was o the States, but alas the start date didn’t work with our timing.
Bummer! Been hoping to see you guys again!! :)