Thursday, May 26, 2016

United suspends Lagos-Houston



United Airlines has officially announced that it will be suspending all of its current 6 weekly Lagos-Houston nonstop flights effective 29JUN16. UA has been voicing strong concerns over repatriating forex out of Nigeria for the past 6 months and now has pulled the plug as they dont want to risk another 'Venezuela' on their cash flow balance sheet.

A statement from UA is mentioned below:

"The IAH-LOS route has been underperforming financially for several years. Because of its importance to key Houston-based customers, we continued to invest in it; however, the recent downturn in the energy sector has caused these customers to spend less on travel. Additionally, various U.S. companies, including United, have not been able to collect revenue from tickets and cargo sold locally in Nigerian currency. As about half of the revenue generated by the route comes from Nigeria point-of-sale, this has made the route unsustainable.

We will be redeploying the aircraft to our popular SFO-TLV (Tel Aviv, Israel) route, which will expand from three-times-weekly to daily in October. Demand is high to TLV from both SFO and EWR, so adding capacity here makes sense."

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