Nigeria Airlines Cannot Sell Tickets at Lower Fares than it is Currently Selling them.........

For those that still dream about air ticket coming down drastically, hear what the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Medview Airline, Alhaji Muneer Bankole  have to say.

Is it possible for Nigerian airlines crash the fares so that more Nigerians could travel by air? To be honest to you, Nigerian airlines cannot sell tickets at lower fares than it is currently selling them. If any sells tickets at N8000 or N600 I can tell you that I will never guarantee the airworthiness of that aircraft. First, you must have aircraft that is airworthy, serviceable and there is nowhere in Africa that they are producing or manufacturing aircraft, I have not seen yet. It is not like Aba where they are producing luxurious buses or Kaduna where they are producing Peugeot. I have never heard of it. Aircraft as you know is something of a very high price, the minimum you can talk of a new one is from $50 million. If you go to the market you will have aircraft selling at about$7.5 million.  By the time you trade the dollar into Naira, $7.5 million will be going for over N1 billion.

Number one, that aircraft must be airworthy or be serviceable. Number two, you can fly and close your eyes. You must be ready to keep some money that will help you to take of operational challenges and to augment your business, day in day out. For flying what we are flying, we spend N300 million, averagely monthly for fuel alone. Let me be frank with you, there is no magic anybody will want to play to reduce the air fare so that other people can fly. The cost of fuel alone takes over three quarters of the operating cost of an airline. If you have to put in wear and tear of the tyres, cycles of the engine, navigational landing airport charges, you will find out that the price the airlines are charging presently is low and it is even doubtful that any airline is breaking even. So if you really look at it; if you bring down the price further than that it mean that in  two months most airlines will go home, then everybody will reverse back to the bad roads.

Even in advanced countries where you can easily buy tickets with credit cards, very few people actually fly. But if you drop the price in order to get more Nigerians to fly, many of the airlines will not have money to maintain their aircraft. It is practically impossible, the cost of fuel alone, the cost of catering and you have to pay salaries, you have to pay parking for the aeroplane, you have to buy tyres, it is not like a car whereby you can buy a tyre January 2014 and it is still on the car five years down the road. And in Medview, we take safety first, so the cost of making it popular for people to fly is totally out of the question.