• New schedule adds more flights on key Auckland-Christchurch market
• Focus on peak-time domestic services will appeal to leisure and business travellers
• Wellington-Queenstown route suspended from 1 September

Jetstar will increase flights between Auckland and Christchurch from September as it realigns its New Zealand schedule to meet market demand.

David Hall, Jetstar CEO Australia and New Zealand, said the new schedule would provide a better spread of services to provide more choice to the leisure and business markets on main trunk routes.

“Domestic travellers are telling us they want more competitive fare options at peak travel times across the main trunk routes so we’ve designed our new schedule to meet this demand,” Mr Hall said.

“From September we’ll fly more often on weekdays at peak times between Auckland and Christchurch. This supports the changes we made last November to our local schedule, when we added new peak-time flights between Auckland and Wellington and Wellington and Christchurch.”

“In addition, we’re seeing a growing number of customers travel on Jetstar for business. Our new schedule will provide those customers with new options to travel at peak times.”

Mr Hall said more and more Kiwis were making a smart choice in travelling with Jetstar to make their leisure or business dollars go further and were responding positively to the airline’s consistently strong domestic on-time performance results.

“We’ve made on-time performance a key pillar of our service improvement programme in New Zealand. On average, around 88% of domestic flights this year have departed within 15 minutes of scheduled departure time and in May several days recorded 100% on-time departure performance,” he said.

Jetstar will suspend its four weekly return services between Wellington and Queenstown from 1 September, after the winter ski season. Flights on the leisure route began in December 2011 using Jetstar’s 180-seat Airbus A320 aircraft.

Mr Hall said both Queenstown and Wellington remained key destinations for Jetstar and the airline would continue to seek opportunities in both markets.

“We fly daily to Queenstown from Auckland and Australia on a year round basis, and recently confirmed an increase in our trans-Tasman schedule to four weekly flights from Melbourne and three from Sydney. Both Queenstown and Wellington are important to our network and we’ll continue to review how we can grow services to these destinations.”

Jetstar offers over 280 flights a week on domestic New Zealand routes including Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Queenstown and Dunedin.