Auckland Airport executive Scott Tasker has a new job and two big challenges.
He has to help entice financially battered airlines to return to a remote part of the world, while also providing a better experience for millions of travellers using the airport.
The aeronautical and route development role he has had since 2017 now has an expanded role of general manager customer and aero commercial, with responsibility for the airport's customer strategy and standards. His work spans the domestic and international terminals, Strata Lounge, transport services, retail and property and the call centre.
Before Covid, the airport handled 20 million passengers a year, but for a while last year international numbers fell to around levels last seen in 1972.
But with travel demand rebounding more strongly than the most optimistic forecasts, the pressure is on, and airports and airlines are struggling to keep up. This week Air New Zealand said it was cutting capacity by around 1.5 per cent to give it "breathing space" in the run-up to Christmas.
Auckland Airport has what chief executive Carrie Hurihanganui calls a renewed vision to transform the travel experience — making the airport not just a place where people go from A to B. "It's not something to take lightly," says Tasker.
"From [board] governance to the last employee, you're transforming the way that people are thinking so that they put the customer at the heart of the role." He says this means taking serving customers out of the day-to-day operational, commercial revenue side of the businesses.
"My new role is to be the voice of the customer at the executive table to drive the strategy and delivery."
Tasker says the airport has to get the basics right. "That's what we're focused on today and what we'll be focused on more — how do we build out to add new products, services and experiences."
The company has established a Customer Centre of Excellence. "I'm leading that and we've got some really good people in the business that have joined; we're bringing in some other external expertise as well."
The first step is consolidating data to get to know customers and understand what they value.
The airport will ask itself how it can become a better business partner for its many customers and stakeholders, and what it needs to change about the services, products and experiences for passengers.
For the time being, one thing it is stuck with is the domestic terminal.
The international terminal's airside departure area has won praise and is slowly building back its wide range of shopping and food. And it is spacious, in sharp contrast to the domestic terminal built 60 years ago.
"We acknowledge that the domestic terminal needs improving," says Tasker.
But he says the existing domestic terminal will have to carry on for now. While the company is pushing on with plans to develop a $1 billion-plus integrated jet terminal — to be built onto the southeastern end of the international terminal — that won't be open until early next decade.
"I just want to be really clear that is a priority for me and our business as we come out of Covid to invest in improvements and the existing domestic terminal," says the 48-year-old Tasker.
"Within the footprint of the existing terminal there is the ability to optimise dwell space, but we're also looking at how can we improve things like customer seating, toilet facilities, how can we provide food and beverage and retail offerings that are appropriate to the domestic traveller."
Announcements on this are coming in the next few months.
Lobby group Airlines for Australia and New Zealand (A4ANZ) has been critical of facilities, targeting what it sees as unnecessary shops in a cramped area.
But Tasker says passengers don't want an empty space. "Let's be clear that what customers tell us is that they do actually value food, beverage and retail offerings."
The airport was looking at other ways of improving the domestic terminal's aesthetics and how people can move through the terminal more efficiently.
"But ultimately our focus also is on the need to deliver the new integrated domestic jet terminal, which we are back onto that project now."
Elements of design have restarted, the airport is in "deep discussions" with airlines about it and enabling works for the integrated terminal are under way.
"There's a lot of things that we need to move out of the way to be able to start to build - fuel pipeline, power centres, our airport operations centre, waste facilities and the livestock handling facility," says Tasker.
"In a period where passenger volumes are expected to be lower, we're getting on with what makes sense to do now so that when we're ready to push the Go button, we can hit the ground running faster."
Tasker was a prominent figure at the airport during pre-pandemic times of record growth. He was business development manager Americas for 17 months in 2015-16 before leading aeronautical business development.
And before the big role at the airport he was at the coalface of the travel sector at a time when his science degree with a forestry major wasn't in much demand, after the timber industry suffered a major downturn during the Asian economic crisis.
Born in Dunedin and educated in Rotorua, his first fulltime job was as a frontline travel agent for Flight Centre in Christchurch.
"I had a real passion for travel, Flight Centre was very customer-centric with a really strong focus on sales and targets so clients repeat." He says it was a great grounding in the industry before a three-year job with Rima Travel in London during his OE.
The firm catered for the entertainment industry in boom times. One of his jobs was to arrange personal travel for Ronan Keating and the firm handled bookings for U2 and record companies.
"I was at the coalface of dealing with some fairly high net worth customers and demanding corporate customers."
Back in New Zealand, he got into the airline industry, first as a sales executive for Lufthansa and then for Emirates as it started up in this country in 2003. The rapidly expanding global airline grew its operations here almost overnight, and for a time Auckland was a major port for Emirates' giant A380s.
Tasker was sales manager when he left Emirates in 2010.
"It was really fast paced and I was working for an extremely customer-centric, brand-focused airline."
His role spanned reservations, ticketing, group sales, online sales, travel and trade distribution, through to work building the brand.
"It was a great grounding for a global airline. That was a period of huge growth." His first general manager role was as New Zealand head for Cover-More insurance for around three years, during a major rebrand and amid firming relationships with the travel trade.
Next, for two years he headed the New Zealand part of the global emergency medical and travel assistance company Healix, whose base in this country was running the operation during the part of the day when the British base was asleep.
"It was at the pointy end and delivering assistance when it all goes wrong," says Tasker. The company had big government, airline and NGO clients.
"That was just sort of a really good grounding in deep customer care for the people who are in that kind of significant distress - it was crisis management stuff."
He joined the airport during heady days.
"They were really exciting times; during a four-year period we onboarded something like 13 new carriers and 22 new air routes. So it was an exciting time of significant growth and capacity and connectivity which was great for our business, and changed the dynamic significantly for our inbound tourist industry and provided great new connections for exporters."
Tasker has always been precise in his language and not prone to hyperbole. He does understatement well: "The last couple of years of course have been somewhat different."
The company that was previously an utterly dependable money spinner scrambled to shore up its balance sheet and was to plunge to heavy losses as its terminals sometimes resembled ghost towns.
But Tasker says those in charge kept the faith and had many problems to work through methodically.
"We never thought it was all over because we could see that fundamentally, connectivity for people as well as for trade was something our economy [needed]."
The focus for him was to keep close to airline customers, making sure they understood why flying back to Auckland and New Zealand as border settings eased was still a good idea.
"We were confident that the answers would be found, and in the meantime our role was to preserve our ability to keep operating the airport for essential travel in and out of New Zealand as well as exports and imports."
The airport company worked closely with tenants to help them maintain their viability to recover as well.
"Through the period we have worked really closely with airlines as well as Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown airports and government agencies to solve the problems of the day, but also look for solutions that would enable the country to reconnect," Tasker says.
All the different parts of the aviation system got to know each other much better and he's confident that will continue.
"Everyone needs to work together to make it work, so that's always been in our DNA. But I think that what kind of happened in the last couple of years was just an increase in that sort of understanding and capability across the aviation system."
Forecasting travel and tourism trends is increasingly difficult amid high geopolitical uncertainty and economic volatility. The strength of demand for travel has been a surprise - as demonstrated by crowded airports around the world and high airfares, driven by demand, at a time when airlines are rebuilding balance sheets and struggling to get enough planes back in the air.
Tasker is confident that by December the airport will have 23 airlines back, flying to 37 destinations and be at about 70 per cent of 2019 capacity.
"Our recovery based on the seats that are in the market on sale will be roughly in line with Australia and Singapore. I guess we had a bit of a slower start to recovery than some other places, but it's a more staged sort of recovery."
That recovery will be reflected in the airport's annual result. Forsyth Barr expects the company to reveal an underlying net profit that's close to break-even when it reports its result on August 18. The result should be better than guidance of a loss of up to $50m provided earlier this year, thanks to a stronger passenger recovery than assumed at that time.
While there is a strong recovery on North American routes, constrained capacity across the Tasman is at full stretch. And while Singapore Airlines is building back fast, passenger flights between Auckland and China remain severely restricted. Two of the regional Chinese carriers, Hainan and Sichuan, haven't committed to come back, Thai Airways is not back and Samoa Airlines and Philippine Airlines won't be returning for now.
Setting up a daily long-haul route is a $200 million commitment of capital, and operating costs are through the roof with expensive fuel and increasing labour costs.
"You've got airlines that have been pretty cautious where they deploy capacity, although the demand seems pretty good. When markets open, there doesn't appear to be a demand problem."
Tasker says tactics haven't changed when it comes to attracting new airlines or encouraging existing ones to fly more often.
That means building a detailed business case for flying to New Zealand and sharing it with network planners. Personal connections help, but the planners are hard-nosed in their outlook.
Even before the pandemic, it could take years of work to get them over the line.
"But now you've got airlines with reduced resources needing to deploy them into places that are going to be profitable from the get-go and that's completely understandable, given that they do need to kind of repair their financial situation."
Job: Auckland Airport general manager customer and aero commercial
Age: 48
Family: Married to Steph since 2003. Two daughters, aged 15 and 16
Lives in: Chatswood, on Auckland's North Shore
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