Delta Air Lines is suspending its service from New York (JFK) to Lagos (LOS) over continuing concerns over its ability to repatriate money currently locked in Nigeria.
Delta Suspends JFK – Lagos Route Over Repatriation Concerns Effective October 4, 2022
British Airways and Emirates have recently announced a service suspension to Nigeria, citing an inability to pull the money it collects for its service out of Nigeria. Delta has faced the same issue and the Atlanta-based airline is now cutting its service to Nigeria in half, by eliminating its New York flight. Service from Atlanta will continue to operate at the present time, and Delta “remains committed” to Nigeria according to a statement released about the service suspension:
“Delta is suspending its nonstop service between New York-JFK and Lagos to fit the current demand environment. The airline continues to operate service between Lagos and Atlanta and offers connections to New York and other cities across the United States. Customers impacted by our suspended New York-JFK to Lagos service will be reaccommodated on Delta operated flights or service operated by our joint venture partners. Delta remains committed to the Nigeria market.”
Even though the Central Bank of Nigeria has recently released $265 million to international airlines, that amounts to roughly only half the amount of money that airlines have been unable to remove from the country.
To avoid digging deeper, Delta will no longer accept the Nigerian naira. All tickets between the USA and Nigeria will be sold in USD only and only available via online booking so that the money does not remain trapped in Nigeria.
The Nigerian government has not responded specifically to the service suspension but has claimed it does not have sufficient foreign currency reserves for airlines to withdraw.
CONCLUSION
Delta will suspend its JFK-LOS route and attempt to stem further bleeding by only accepting payment for the remaining ATL-LOS route in USD. Nigeria should realize that if it wants any foreign airline service, it cannot hold money hostage or spend resources that do not belong to it.
Sidenote: Wouldn’t it be something if Delta responded to the brouhaha over the 767-300 currently being made by the government in Ghana by suspending service to Ghana?
> Read More: Ghana Considers Banning All Aircraft Older Than 20 Years From Its Airspace
image: Delta
They should’ve responded to that prince’s emails…
Hopefully they fix this problem. It’s also not a good sign economically if their central bank does not have enough foreign currency reserves.
Delta has always said that their two routes to Lagos might as well be to different destinations.
JFK-LOS is dominated by VFR traffic with a split US-NG point of sale.
ATL-LOS is overwhelmingly US point of sale corporate traffic.
Pretty easy to judge which market they are banking on to carry them through this road bump.
Interesting that the central bank doesn’t have enough foreign currency reserves.
Nigeria has the largest economy in Africa. In 2021, Nigeria ‘s gross domestic product was over £400 billion. Based on GDP, Nigeria has the 26 th largest economy in the world,
So where does all this wealth go? Guess again.
Right now they are spending nearly 90% of their gross monthly forex revenues on retail fuel price subsidies. Retail price for fuel is around 175 NGN/liter right now (approx. $0.4/liter at the official rate or $0.2/liter at the market rate). Ahead of elections coming up, no politician is going to rock that boat.
What do people do if they come from Minnesota to go to Lagos what airline would they take then
You can take United via Newark or Delta via Atlanta or KLM from MSP via Amsterdam.
@Theresa – Historically the plurality of traffic between MSP and LOS has gone over Atlanta anyway (3x as much as over JFK). In fact, Skyteam routes via CDG and AMS are also busier than routing over JFK which is the 4th popular routing by volume.
Behind that are AA/BA routings over Chicago (MSP-ORD-LHR-LOS) and UA/ET/KP routings over EWR/LFW (MSP-EWR-LFW-LOS). Interestingly, the AA/BA routing has by far the highest average fare (nearly 3x as much as the UA/ET/KP routing and double that of the MSP-ATL-LOS routing).
Note : Above data doesn’t yet fully capture UA’s IAD-LOS flight which will have changed some of this slightly.