GOL CEO Celso Ferrer at the CAPA's Latin America Aviation & LCCs Summit

Transcript

Celso Ferrer:We are focused on our network expansion through Latin America and South Florida with the 737 MAXs. And as we are pushing the existing -8 into its limits, which is, for example, flying from Brasília to Miami, Brasília to Orlando, and Brasília to Cancún, The 3 longest routes we have in the world flying by a 737, we want Boeing to develop a 737 MAX-8ER. So then we are going to be able to fly to Europe, we are going to be able to fly to even North US. So that's where we are trying to create really the momentum. I want other airlines to join this group and to, I mean, give the clear message to Boeing that this aircraft would be unbeatable for this type of route. Prior to the pandemic, we were always absolutely engaged with Boeing in every sense, also in the engineering side. So we were the airline who developed together with Boeing the 737-800 SFP, the short-field performance, the first aircraft to land and take off from Santos Dumont, which is 1-kilometre runway in the middle of downtown Rio with 186 passengers. So we are always pushing Boeing to talking with our engineers to develop something even better, and we are asking the engineers for a 737 with a longer range than the -8, which we think is the right size for this type of mission. Our strategy is to go to the new markets, point-to-point markets in the international markets where we can go with what we call a more point-to-point approach. Like we are flying to Miami, but we are flying to Miami from Brasília, from Fortaleza, from Manaus, and we want to fly from Porto Alegre, from other cities in Brazil to Big cities in the US, in Mexico, and Colombia. That's the strategy, and also to Europe one day. Fortaleza is going to be launched in December, and Manaus-Miami also launched in December this year. We are happy to see the demand for international travelers coming back. We were really conservative in our international expansion. We were really focused on the domestic recovery. But from May and on, May this year to 2022, we started to see more flexibility within the rules and also in the bilateral agreements between the countries. And we started to see more demand. And now we are seeing a booming demand to US, for example. And that's where we want to be ready to take that traffic. And we also are flying to Argentina, we're flying to Bolivia, we are flying to Paraguay, we're flying to— we just announced a double daily flight to Montevideo in Uruguay. So a big increase in our flights to Montevideo as well. So we are really excited to have even more flights, international flights that we had pre-pandemic because we have the MAX right now that we will really expand the GOL model within Latin America and South Florida.

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