Finnair today released its results for the first six months of the current fiscal year, and the numbers for April – June -period are as bad as one could have expected.
The airline commented on the press release that it had already paid out €270,000,000 in Refunds to passengers through June but still has more than €100,000,000 unprocessed.
You can access Finnair here.
Here’s the relevant part of the press release:
Between February and June, we have paid over 270 million euros to customers in refunds for flights cancelled due to the COVID-19 situation. In four months, we have received as many refund requests as we normally get in three years. Currently, we have processed about two-thirds of the requests. We estimate that we will still pay approximately 100 million euros in refunds to customers. The situation has been totally exceptional and has resulted in delays in refund handling, but we are doing everything we can to minimise the delays. We have made considerable additions to the personnel processing the requests and have also developed robots to speed up the process. I want to apologise to our customers for the delays and thank them sincerely for their patience. We will ensure that all customers get their refunds as soon as possible.
Conclusion
Remember that this is money for flights that passengers had prepaid to Finnair, who then canceled (understandably) them.
You have to give Finnair a credit that they do process refunds, unlike many other European airlines that unlawfully refuse to do (looking at the Lufthansa Group airlines) so, but how many seconds it can take to process each refund?
Finnair is quite optimistic about its traffic projections as it expects to operate 25% of flights in July and 50% in September compared to 2019. You do have to keep in mind, however, that the actual passenger capacity is much lower because most of the widebody flights are still canceled, and Norra operates domestic/European flights with small planes.
