Finnair facing long-haul crisis as its Asia network is cut-off

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• strickers says:

  1 Mar1 March 05:14

  Watching with interest, at the moment BKK, HKT and SIN are still operating. I’m flying BKK-HEL-LHR in just under a fortnight.

  • BJ says:

    1 Mar1 March 07:45

    Has there been any effort to reroute that by yourself, BA or AY? It is clear we were now fortunate that BA refused our request to reroute our cancelled BA flights from EDI-BKK on AY in favour of QR. However, with QR still only flying 4x weekly from EDI with small 788s, the Russian situation, and the grounded a350s, rerouting pax from other sirlines and potentially overbooking seems like a recipe for downgrades and bumps in the short term. Accorcing to the BA agent our seats were purchased by them in the absence of any available award seats, hopefully this will help us retain our business seafs but I am not that optimistic.

    • S says:

      1 Mar1 March 09:15

      BA BKK doesn’t restart until October

• S says:

  1 Mar1 March 05:46

  I’m due to fly SIN-HEL-LHR on Saturday so hoping that still runs. The Heathrow leg looks to have the new seats which I’m interested to try out.

  • YC says:

    1 Mar1 March 06:33

    How do u tell which routes/flights have the new seats?

    • S says:

      1 Mar1 March 06:51

      The flight is an A330 with 1-2-1 layout rather than the 2-2-1 layout of the existing seats. I think that means the new seat.

    • Rob says:

      1 Mar1 March 07:15

      The 10.20 Sat has the new seat – I am flying in on it.

• pauldb says:

  1 Mar1 March 06:11

  Any airports that could temporarily be a better hub, with an underserved local market? BER?

  • BJ says:

    1 Mar1 March 07:55

    Prestwick Airport 🙂 They’d get it for pennies (could probably even buy it), no congestion, no weather problems…

  • Lady London says:

    1 Mar1 March 13:04

    Apparently, only if you want your luggage to potentially disappear.

    Have been told by another airline they were having a lot of issues with this in BER

• Tim P says:

  1 Mar1 March 06:40

  I hope my LHR-HEL-BKK; SIN-HEL-LHR flights later this month survive. They’ve been rearranged once already. I was looking forward to trying the new seat.

• The Streets says:

  1 Mar1 March 07:05

  HKT booked in a few weeks and hoping to make it to the less than two weeks mark. I wonder what Finnair are like with rerouting passengers

  • marcw says:

    1 Mar1 March 10:01

    They explicitly say they continue flying to all of SouthEast Asia and India.
    Only China (+ HKG) and Japan are cancelled.

• Lee says:

  1 Mar1 March 08:03

  I have a very tight 40 minutes connection for BKK-HEL-MAN for my July trip. Looks like a stopover will be inevitable if this thing last for that long.

• Nils Lloyd-Penny says:

  1 Mar1 March 08:09

  We are due to fly LHR-HEL-SIN end of March and back end of April in J. Does anyone know if Finnair cancel the flight would they put us onto a different airline or just refund the money?

  • Rob says:

    1 Mar1 March 08:38

    They are an EU airline so need to reroute.

• Bernard B says:

  1 Mar1 March 08:32

  Hardly a ‘crisis’. Much overused word.

  Finnair has already much increased Atlantic flying from Helsinki and Stockholm as it knew Asian recovery would be slow due to their covid neuroses (and China’s failing covid policy).

  Indian and SE Asian routes see modest diversions. Flight lengthening but not a crisis.

  It will allow faster embodiment of the new product.

  The JAL operated codeshare on a 787-9 to Tokyo is still running.

  So Finbair can’t operate flights to a China and Hong Kong that it wasn’t operating tgat much, and when it did they were empty (in the passenger cabin).

  Hardly a crisis. They might even save their Asian losses.

  • Rob says:

    1 Mar1 March 08:36

    Check out the Finnair share price reaction.

    • Mike Hall says:

      1 Mar1 March 09:09

      Just reading this and so no one falls for Russian disinformation, its worth noting that at end 2021 Finnair had 1.5bn debt. It has a 0.8bn market equity value. So it has a 2.3bn enterprise value. Thus, for example, even a 10% fall in the share price implies the Enterprise value has fallen by about 3%.
      That’s not a crisis. Its misleading to suggest it is, even if it grabs headlines. Let’s try and avoid RT style comments please.
      The article has created unnecessary worry too. Those worried need to know that Finnair has a large Finnish state shareholder, that also means this won’t become a crisis.
      Finnair continue to operate Bangkok, Singapore, Delhi, etc.
      For more about their move away from Asia look at this:
      https://investors.finnair.com/~/media/Files/F/Finnair-IR/documents/en/reports-and-presentation/2022/q4-21-presentation-en.pdf

      • Rob says:

        1 Mar1 March 09:49

        Mike – the article is based ENTIRELY on a press release put out by Finnair yesterday.

      • pauldb says:

        1 Mar1 March 10:45

        1.2b of that 1.5b net debt is lease liabilities, backed by the aircraft. Given that very little of the value that’s been destroyed relates to those third-party owned aircraft, the reaction in the value of the operating business is much greater (and the bonds have dropped about 3% also). The market cap has dropped from about 1.2 to 0.8b so the operating business’ value from about 1.5b to 1.1b.

  • BJ says:

    1 Mar1 March 09:02

    The fallout could drag on for years but money talks so hopefully loud enough for Russia to come round sooner than later.

  • Lady London says:

    1 Mar1 March 13:07

    Might depend on freight though. I would take a guess there was a lot of freight business airlines were relying on through that corridor.

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