Air Baltic navigates Latvia lockdown with capacity and IPO plan intact

Latvia-based Air Baltic made it through its home country’s recent four-week lockdown without adjusting its capacity – or its plans for an IPO in the coming years. Speaking to FlightGlobal at the Dubai air show on 15 November – the day Latvia’s lockdown ended – the carrier’s CE Martin Gauss said load factors fell by around 10 percentage points to 50% during the period, but that the business benefited from having positioned itself to deal with the ups and downs of Covid-19. Therefore, instead of reacting with shock to the challenges created by the lockdown announcement in October, Air Baltic was instead ready to calmly ask itself “what do we do?” to make it through the four weeks, according to Gauss. Helpfully, the lockdown did not come with a ban on outbound travel. “We did an advertising campaign to take people and fly them away from that local pandemic, and it worked very well,” Gauss states. “We were surprised how well we were able to stimulate outbound traffic when of course the inbound traffic was heavily reducing.”<br/>