Staff reduced 24% during, post lockdown

Dunedin Airport has had to let go nearly a quarter of its workforce after its revenue and the number of flights it received plunged during and after the lockdown.

During Alert Level 4 the airport’s volume of passengers — a big signal of its level of income — fell to as low as 0.8% compared with pre-Covid levels.

Two twin turbo-prop flights were coming in a week during the lockdown — one on Mondays and one on Fridays — meaning only a fraction of its usual staffing levels was needed.

"We had to look at resizing the business to the environment and the information we had at the time," Dunedin Airport chief executive Richard Roberts said.

Before the lockdown the airport had 43 staff and following a consultation after the national Covid-19 restrictions came into force, staffing levels dropped to 32.5 — down 24%.

The redundancies have come from the airport’s garage staff, its emergency services and customer services and there was a management vacancy that was not filled.

Mr Roberts said the airport, which is owned 50-50 by the Dunedin City Council and the Government, had to ask its shareholders if they could let staff go to better fit capacity.

"The answer was ‘you should resize your business to the environment’. At that point we did."

Airlines were telling Dunedin Airport they were expecting about 10% capacity through to August, so deciding which areas it needed to ensure had good staffing levels was difficult.

"The schedules were changing all the time," airport general manager of business development Megan Crawford said.

"They were doing a schedule and then they were pumping in more planes. They were up-gauging ... and it was all based on what the demand was looking like."

The other complication of resizing was making sure the airport had enough staff for when more flights started to come in, Mr Roberts said.

After consultation, some roles were saved because workers, such as those in the customer service department, were happy to cut their hours by as much as half to ensure all their colleagues remained employed.

"That team decided ‘no, no we think we can hang on. Six of us will do the three roles’," he said.

"They’re literally cutting their hours in half. They were coming in, having a day, then having five days off and then coming in again."

That lasted for about four or five weeks until two long-serving members decided to leave, which left four people in customer service.

The garage had to close and move to an automated service — four roles were lost there.

The firefighters at the airport’s emergency services had to drop their numbers from 19 to 15. Mr Roberts estimated they were doing 10% to 20% of their usual work.

The airport had been able to get the wage subsidy.

It received the initial package, getting $292,413.60 for 42 staff, and then the extended wage subsidy with 34 staff, when it received $148,019.20.

All staff had wages reduced to 80%.

Some of the airport’s other ventures came to the fore during the lockdown, a couple of dairy farms it owns and about 32 rental houses at Momona continuing to deliver revenue.

As much as 60% of the company’s revenue is non-aeronautical — this is from the farms, the rental houses, the car parking, commercial tenants in the airport and other sources.

The rest of the revenue, deemed aeronautical, is the money an airline pays the airport to land and fly out aircraft and it is charged at about $9 per passenger.

Mr Roberts went to work every day during the lockdown and remembered looking in disbelief at the state of the airport.

Most of the airport had to be closed during the lockdown because it was "bleeding cash".

"Lights are going off, air conditioning’s going off and they’re all run by computers.

"Car park lights were turning off at night ... all that kind of stuff. The place itself was dark, it was pretty cold ... there were no passengers [and] nothing was open."

The way the number of flights and passengers coming through the airport dried up was also a source of disbelief.

Passengers were down 39% in March as Covid-19 started to spread throughout the country.

The lockdown began on March 26.

In April, the number of people coming through the airport, either disembarking or embarking a flight, was down 99.1%, Mr Roberts said.

The only flights in and out of Dunedin were for essential working matters or people trying to get back to their home country via Auckland.

In May, flights were down 91% but in June things started to get better, and they were down 69%.

In July, when the airport was hoping to see something close to normality because of the school holidays, they were 41% down on pre-Covid levels.

Mr Roberts estimated they would be about 60% down for August because of the return of Covid restrictions.