Birgir Jonsson, CEO, Play Airlines, at the CAPA World Aviation Summit 2022

Transcript

Birgir Jonsson:How has COVID affected your plans? Affected our plans in a way that as a startup, we saw an opportunity in actually starting an airline in COVID. So we actually saw a lot of opportunity in the situation. There were pluses and minuses, of course, but overall, we have been able to use the pandemic and the crisis to our benefit. It was easy to get the right kind of aircraft, so we were able to use the pandemic as an opportunity. It was easy to get the right kind of people. People wanted to work, they wanted to take part in a startup. Investors saw the opportunity that would arise after basically the pandemic in the return of travel and aviation. So overall, I think, you know, obviously we would have We wanted to avoid it, but there's a lot of benefits. Well, our network and basically business plan is that we are based in Iceland and we are connecting the US to Europe with a stop in Iceland with a mixture of to and from traffic to Iceland. So we are basically a small network carrier in the middle of the Atlantic. We took the unusual step of funding the company by listing it on the stock exchange before our first flight. And that has been a very interesting experience, but overall has worked very well. We were able to get our first operating profit now after Q3, and we are forecasting that we will be in profitability after next year. We are very optimistic as for 2023. I think that we have all our chips in place to benefit from basically the market. We just launched our full transatlantic network this year, and we really hope to benefit from it in the coming months. The airline had its first flight in 2021. We are turning over about $140 million this year. We're going up to $330 million next year with employment or number of staff between 500 and 600 next year. We are at nearly 400 now, so we are growing quite fast. We will have about 5 or 6 US destinations feeding into maybe 15 to 20 European destinations. Thank you.

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