Air New Zealand CEO Nikhil Ravishankar knows he’s in the hot seat. And Roger Sharp, chairman of Technology Queenstown, called it plainly when beginning their coffee chat that opened WiT Queenstown.
“You’ve taken over New Zealand’s perfect storm,” Sharp said. “Engine issues, high oil prices and on the 28th of August you’re releasing a result you’ve guided to a $340 to $390 million loss. So, how’s it going, mate?”
Ravishankar was equally blunt. “It is tough,” he said. “But I don’t do it alone—we have an incredible team, a great culture and the future for us is actually looking quite good.”
That team, he noted, has been almost entirely rebuilt since the pandemic. Of Air New Zealand’s 12,000 staff, close to 70% have joined since COVID.
“It’s a huge corporate reset,” Ravishankar said.
An accidental CEO, called up mid-lockdown
Ravishankar’s own route to the top job was, by his account, unplanned. Long before he ran the airline, he was one of its most loyal customers—a 17-year Airpoints Gold Elite flyer who’d banked 10 years of status.
“I grew up on our airline, actually, because we like New Zealand, it’s actually bigger than people give it credit for as a country.”
The call that changed that relationship came during COVID, from the airline’s chair: “Nikhil, here’s the hard stuff—the country needs you.”
He joined initially to help drive the pandemic reset, not to become CEO. “I’m as surprised as you are,” he told Sharp.
Redefining what a 'digital airline' actually means
Air New Zealand has publicly committed to becoming “the world’s leading digital airline,” a phrase Ravishankar was keen to strip of its sci-fi connotations.
“It’s not about teleportation or time travel or some other thing we pull out of a hat,” he said. “Being the world’s leading digital airline is actually more about how we operate the business—the capability, and really that’s around building resilience. I fundamentally believe the world’s best airline is going to be the world’s best resilient airline.”
He added, “If the last six years have taught me anything, it’s that we are in as volatile a world as it’s ever been and as least volatile as it will ever be again.”
I fundamentally believe the world’s best airline is going to be the world’s best resilient airline.
Nikhil Ravishankar, Air New Zealand
Part of that resilience push has meant restructuring how the airline works internally. Four or five years ago, Air New Zealand deliberately broke from the traditional airline org chart.
“We tilted the airline on its side by about 90 degrees,” Ravishankar said, moving from siloed departments to cross-functional teams, a structure he credits to the airline’s size rather than in spite of it.
“We’re not a big airline, so we don’t need to be bureaucratic, we don’t need to be functionally fueled. We’re just a very collegial bunch, and that’s really been paying dividends.”
The service culture that comes with it, he argued, is the harder-to-replicate half of the airline’s brand: genuine warmth from cabin crew that consistently surprises international travelers.
“Americans are always surprised that our cabin crew actually look at people, make eye contact and smile and say nice things.”
AI as 'a universal optimizer' with a hallucination problem to solve
Asked to explain how artificial intelligence (AI) is actually being used inside the airline, Ravishankar painted a clear picture of where the technology creates real value in aviation.
Airlines, he said, are fundamentally organized as a chain of disconnected functions—fleet planning, network planning, crew rostering, maintenance—each running on its own software, each handing off to the next in a process that can take six months to plan a single season.
“There are no tools for cross-functional collaboration. The entire airline software industry has replicated the fuel silos that exist within airlines.”
AI, for the first time, offers something different: “This almost universal optimizer, where you put all of these variables into the mix and very quickly start to produce [answers]—though you have to work hard on reducing hallucinations, otherwise we’ll end up flying to Dubai or something.”
And he threw in this comment. “When you’re in New Zealand and you have only 115 planes, and your competitors have 1,500, 1,600 planes, you just have to be smarter.”
6 years waiting to say 1 sentence
Ravishankar also talked about the engine crisis that’s defined much of his tenure. Air New Zealand has been hit by global reliability issues on both its narrowbody engines (Pratt & Whitney’s geared turbofan) and its widebody Rolls-Royce Trent 1000s—a double exposure shared, he noted, with only one other full-service carrier in the world, ANA in Japan.
The result: roughly 20% of the fleet grounded for years, about $2 billion worth of aircraft sitting idle. “Literally gathering dust in the desert,” he said. The turnaround has finally arrived. “All of our aircraft are back. I’ve waited six years to be able to say that sentence—I’ve dreamt about it.”
The fleet news gets better. By the end of the year, all of Air New Zealand’s 787s will carry a new cabin product, as the airline becomes the first in the world to retrofit the type.
Air New Zealand also holds the distinction of being the aircraft’s original launch customer globally, and in November will become the first airline anywhere to fly the ultra-long-range 787 variant, featuring Skynest, the industry’s first dedicated sleep pods in economy. The new long-haul cabin will offer seven distinct seat products on a single aircraft, deliberately excluding first class, with five of those built specifically around sleep.
The 'perpetual bridesmaid' problem
Speaking of the challenges faced by New Zealand as a destination, particularly from the U.S. market, on how to move awareness to conversion, Ravishanker gave this reading: Roughly 40 million Americans travel long-haul every year, and fewer than 1% of them choose New Zealand, despite the country consistently testing as a top-of-mind bucket-list destination.
“We’re always the perpetual third destination on the bucket list,” he said. “The bridesmaid. We need to now be the bride.”
We’re always the perpetual third destination on the bucket list, the bridesmaid. We need to now be the bride.
Nikhil Ravishankar, Air New Zealand
The barrier, in his view, isn’t brand awareness—Tourism New Zealand has done that work—but the psychological “tyranny of distance.” The airline has experimented accordingly, including trialling in-flight entertainment ads on competitor United Airlines flights out of San Francisco: Do you know New Zealand is closer than the flight you’re currently on?
“We’re moving from a brand-centered view of marketing to a much more precise, almost actuary-style view,” he said. “There are enough people who intend to come. We just need to talk to them at the right time.”
Betting on agentic commerce
Air New Zealand is one of 20 companies named as an OpenAI frontier customer partner, and Ravishankar was candid that the airline doesn’t yet know what that partnership will produce, only that it needs to be in the room.
“Part of that partnership is very much focused on what agentic commerce looks like. New Zealand’s been really good at building brand love with humans. How do you do that with an agent? We don’t know the answer. But we know we need to lean into it.
“This airline has survived because it’s been willing to try stuff.”
Queenstown, loyalty economics and backing the 'crazy' idea
Turning the conversation to Australia, its biggest market, Ravishankar described Queenstown as what the industry calls a “burn market” for Australian travelers: Flyers earn their points on work travel elsewhere, then burn them bringing family to Queenstown on holiday—a dynamic that structurally favors loyalty programs based in bigger, points-earning markets over smaller carriers like Air New Zealand.
“It’s just natural. We need to be more clever about competing in that environment,” he said, framing the airline’s underdog status as an asset rather than an excuse. “We always love being the underdog. That means we come up with clever ways of not just coping but thriving.”
Sharp ended the conversation, asking what Ravishankar thought of his and Technology Queenstown’s ambitions to build a travel-tech cluster at the “edge of the world.”
Ravishankar was blunt as well about this.
“You do need a bit of craziness to attempt something like this and I think it’s a fabulous idea. I remember the phone call during COVID when you said you wanted to set up an AI school here. You had me at hello.”
“When we create something world-class here, we’ll easily attract world-class talent. I’m not only rooting for it, but I’m also going to actively look to support it.”
This story originally appeared on WiT.