Emerald Airlines CEO Conor McCarthy at CAPA’s Airlines in Transition 2022 summit
Conor McCarthy has been behind airline development across the world for more than 20 years and spoke to CAPA TV on the sidelines of the CAPA Airline Leader Summit - 'Airlines in Transition 2022’ about the latest example, Emerald Airlines in the Republic of Ireland. Hear exclusive views from the executive on the Covid crisis, the industry’s recovery, the basis of the Emerald Airlines business concept, its growth and potential to replicate the model with other airline partners.
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Transcript
Conor McCarthy:We've been advising around the world for the last 21 years. We've helped establish airlines like Viva Aerobus, AirAsia, AirAsia X, Jetstar in Australia, but with the COVID pandemic, our team was all Confined to base. An opportunity came up where Aer Lingus were putting their regional franchise, which is an exclusive franchise for Aer Lingus on the regional routes, mainly between Ireland and the UK. They put that out to tender, and had we— had it been business as usual, we would have been too busy. But we decided to take a look at it, got very interested, and today we're flying. Yeah, so we have 12 ATR 72-600s on order. We have 5 of them delivered as it stands and in service. We're due a 6th by the end of this week and a 7th in the end of next week. So we'll be up to those 12 aircraft by June, and we've established 2 bases already, that's in Dublin and Belfast, and we will split the fleet across those bases and serve mainly the cities other than London outside in the UK from Dublin and Belfast. We've a lot of competition on those routes, so 80% of our routes are competed by either easyJet in Belfast or Ryanair. So we've got some big competition there with some very, very high-density large jet aircraft. But we also, as you mentioned, serve a huge role for Aer Lingus in that we transfer passengers that are traveling to the Dublin hub for transatlantic routes. Aer Lingus have about 14 gateways into the US and Canada, and because of that, we can serve those routes and offer customs clearance and pre-clearance and immigration at Dublin for UK passengers traveling to the United States. At the moment, probably 25% of our bookings are coming from the United States. If that was to be equal and opposite, that would mean that almost 50% of our sales have come from transatlantic itineraries. So it becomes a very important piece of our business, but equally we become a very important piece of Aer Lingus' transatlantic network. It is quite scalable, but my personal ambitions are not really to grow the airline much more than 20 aircraft or so. I think that's about the capacity of the regional commuter network in and out of Ireland. But with our cost base, we've built a really efficient cost base. We have a very consistent, simple product. It's very easily replicated, not just for Aer Lingus but for other airlines that want a regional franchisee. So it's quite possible that we could end up with other batches of aircraft operations in other cities.
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