The administrators of grounded Australian carrier Bonza will terminate all staff and cancel all future flights after no firm buyer emerged for the grounded airline.
Hall Chadwick, the carrier’s administrator, says that no binding offers had been received for Bonza by 7 June.
“The Administrators assisted a number of interested parties through the sale campaign, allowing each party to conduct their due diligence and formulate any offer,” says Hall Chadwick.
“Unfortunately, the administrators did not receive any binding offers.”
As such, the administrators have “no option but to terminate all employees and cancel all future flights.”
Hall Chadwick adds, however, that a third party could still make an offer for the carrier, which has been grounded since 29 April when it was served with aircraft lease terminations.
Hall Chadwick adds that it will update all of Bonza’s creditors “shortly,” and that “investigations to the company’s business and affairs are ongoing.”
Bonza, which operated Boeing 737 Max 8s, started operations in January 2023 with a business model focused on unserved Australian domestic routes, and which eschewed services on competitive trunk routes between major cities.
In 2023 it carried more than 750,000 passengers across its domestic network of 38 routes serving 21 destinations. A majority of these routes – around 84% – were previously unserved by low-cost carriers, the airline said.
In May the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said that the permanent demise of Bonza would be detrimental to competition in the country.
“Bonza’s presence represented an opportunity for greater competition to emerge in the concentrated domestic aviation sector, such as if the airline had continued to grow with more aircraft and entered busier routes connecting Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane,” said the ACCC.
