Air New Zealand Reels From Auckland Curbs, Australia Bubble Loss

Read MoreAir New Zealand Ltd. is operating less than one-third of its usual domestic capacity due to tough COVID-19 restrictions in Auckland and doubts whether a travel bubble with Australia will reopen, the airline’s chief executive said on Thursday. “We’re running almost 100 percent outside of Auckland,” Air New Zealand CEO Greg Foran told Reuters in an interview. “It’s a reasonable network but Auckland is literally two-thirds of the domestic network so it’s a pretty significant impact to our business, not having Auckland operating at this stage.” The airline has said it is burning through around NZ$25 million ($17.30 million) to NZ$35 million of cash a month due to the lockdown in the country’s largest city, which the government says will be scaled back in phases as vaccination rates rise. The Pacific nation was among just a handful of countries to bring COVID-19 cases down to zero last year and largely …