When it comes to timing, Paul Scurrah, CEO of Fiji Airways, hasn’t quite got it right. In fact, he started his coffee chat in WiT Queenstown with an apology.
“I feel like I should apologise,” Paul Scurrah said. “I was appointed CEO in Australia in March 2019, and less than a year later COVID hit. I took another job, retired, got talked out of it, came back – and got hit by the biggest fuel crisis in 50 years. It’s me. I’m sorry. I’ll leave the industry. We’ll all be better off.”
His remark got a laugh and set up a conversation that moved from oil-price economics to what actually makes the world’s happiest airline.
A wide-body network built for a country of a million people
Firstly, the scale of Fiji Airways’ operation was surprising for an island of one million people: a fleet of wide-body A330s and A350s flying into Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia, connecting onward via 737 MAX 8s into Australia and New Zealand.
It’s a network built almost entirely on inbound demand – only 3% of the airline’s traffic is outbound locals. The other 97% is international, and nearly 70% of that comes from Australia and New Zealand alone, flown directly into Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington.
“It was becoming really well recognised for – what is the core of us being the world’s happiest airline? The core difference is our people. But it’s also a great connecting point geographically, and we’re building our wings. I was a little surprised myself, when I got the job, about just how far and wide we go, and how good and young the fleet is.”
Betting on the region while others pull back
Asked how the airline is navigating the current fuel crisis, Scurrah said, “Every other airline in the world, because of the fuel price, is actually pulling their planes back. We don’t think that’s the right thing to do for Fiji. We went to the Fijian government and made a very strong commitment – we’re flying everywhere we fly today, and there’s no risk of us pulling out. You can come to Fiji with confidence.”
The bet is regional as much as commercial: Fiji sits in the same time zone as New Zealand, three-plus hours north, “relatively isolated from the conflict” playing out elsewhere, and trading on what he called a genuinely earned reputation for being family friendly. “Touch wood, our bookings are at record levels – for both Fiji and for Fiji Airways.”
Ownership by the state, growth through Qantas
Fiji Airways’ shareholder register is a small window into the geopolitics of Pacific aviation: majority-owned by the Fijian government, with a Canadian pension fund holding around 10% and a small New Zealand stake under 4%.
But the more commercially important relationship, Scurrah said, is with Qantas, a partner rather than a shareholder, and one whose frequent flyer programme, with around 20 million members across Australia and New Zealand, gives Fiji Airways access to loyalty gravity it couldn’t build alone.
“Qantas themselves only fly to Nadi – everywhere else in this part of the world, you need to navigate through us. You can earn points and status credits on all of our flights through Qantas out of Australia and New Zealand as well.”
That relationship compounds through Fiji Airways’ recent Oneworld membership. “Being part of Oneworld gives us access to over 900 new destinations,” Scurrah said. “The customer experience is very consistent – it feels like an extension of what we do.”
“It’s not a claim. It’s one we can back up.”
The “world’s happiest airline” tagline could read as marketing gloss on any other carrier. Scurrah treated it as something closer to an operating principle, one he traced directly back to the hardest period of his career – running Virgin Australia through COVID and into voluntary administration.
“It teaches you that you should have an aspiration for being as happy as you can in the circumstances you’re in,” he said. “It’s a mindset. It’s back to optimism… at the core of happiness there’s a level of gratitude.”
He credited the discipline partly to his own experience living through the Ansett collapse as a general manager years earlier – waiting at home for news, corroded by uncertainty.
“That’s why, during the Virgin administration, I promised I’d do live videos, four or five times a day, even if I couldn’t tell people what was happening. Let’s be grateful we’ve got the best people trying to get us through this – and let’s actually communicate that.”
It’s a habit that appears to have travelled with him to Fiji Airways: a claim about happiness underwritten by a specific, learned discipline about transparency during hard times, not just a friendly cabin crew.
Climate exposure, not as an aside but as the operating context
Asked about sustainability, Scurrah was direct about what makes Fiji’s position different from most airlines discussing the topic. “It’s no more obvious, the challenges we face as a planet, than what you see in Fiji. Variations in sea level don’t have to change very much to have a negative impact. It’s front and centre for everything we do – it’s not something we talk about as an aside.”
Concrete initiatives include sustainable aviation fuel trials and an ambition to eventually draw on Fiji’s sugar industry as a feedstock, alongside a mangrove-planting commitment tied to every takeoff and landing – one Scurrah has personally taken part in.
The airline also frames a chunk of its community spending as being about purpose ahead of margin, funding facilities like village community halls. “There’s a greater purpose to our airline than just making money,” he said. “Our purpose is to help Fiji thrive and that has a secondary impact too, because we’re an incredibly strong and reliable provider of inbound tourists to Australia and New Zealand.”
The Queenstown route that isn’t quite there yet
Interviewer Roger Sharp, chair of Technology Queenstown, put the regional wish-list question to Scurrah directly: would Fiji Airways ever fly Queenstown–Nadi? The answer was an honest maybe, based on aircraft performance rather than appetite.
“There are some operational challenges that come with flying in and out of Queenstown, which we’re working with Boeing on. It probably means some payload restrictions, but people would still fly. It comes down, at the end of the day, to what people are willing to pay. We’re still working on it – I promise, we want to make it happen.”
