As the global pandemic has receded and international travel has bounced back, we have witnessed the resurgence of what experts refer to as the "long-haul low-cost carrier" model (or LHLCC, if you’re a fan of acronyms). You can see it in the emergence of Norse Atlantic from the ashes of Norwegian, the growth of Cebu Pacific, or the fact that every fashionable legacy carrier seems to have an LHLCC ‘accessory’ these days: Singapore Airlines with Scoot, Qantas with JetStar, Lufthansa with Discover Airlines or Japan Airlines with Zipair. So it is unsurprising that All Nippon Airways (ANA) , the largest airline in Japan based on passengers carried, has recently launched its own LHLCC.
Branded as AirJapan , it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ANA, much like its short-haul sister, Peach, but focusing on serving medium-to-long-haul destinations with an LCC business model. But will it succeed within a market segment that is becoming increasingly cluttered? AirJapan: Decades in the making AirJapan was initially founded in 1990 as World Air Network, the charter arm of ANA. After being re-launched as a scheduled airline in 2001 under the name "Air Japan," it began operating passenger and cargo services on behalf of ANA using Boeing 767-300s.
In 2020, ANA unveiled plans to transform the company into a low-cost carrier on longer haul routes , utilizing Boeing 787-8s that it would lease from ANA, and it restyled the brand to AirJapan (no space) and added the slogan “Fly Thoughtful.”.