Argentina’s Second Airline Has Not Flown Since August 6

Flybondi, once the second-largest airline in Argentina, has not operated a single flight since 6 August. The low-cost carrier launched in 2016 and spent the better part of a decade undercutting Aerolineas Argentinas on domestic trunk routes, which made it the default option for a great many travellers moving between Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Mendoza and the Patagonian tourist towns. Since June, all but one of its Boeing 737s has been grounded, brought down by a combination of jet fuel costs, accumulated debt and creditors moving to freeze the company’s bank accounts.

The scale of the disruption is what makes this more than a corporate failure story. Cancellations since the start of the southern summer have affected more than 2,500 flights and roughly 350,000 passengers, and in January alone the airline scrapped 125 flights over a fortnight, leaving an estimated 22,000 people stranded at airports around the country. The airline is now carrying an estimated $19 million in liabilities against tickets it sold for flights that were neither operated nor refunded, which is a very large number of individual travellers holding worthless bookings.

The most immediate practical problem is that there is nowhere to go for help. Flybondi’s website went down and has been serving an internal server error, which removed the only digital channel through which passengers could file claims, request refunds or attempt rebooking. Anyone holding a Flybondi ticket should treat their card issuer as the realistic route to recovery rather than the airline, and should do so promptly, because chargeback windows are counted from the transaction date and many of these bookings were made months ago.

What happens next is unresolved. The airline has been advertising a sharply reduced schedule from 10 September, and a name, OCA Air, has surfaced in restructuring discussions as a possible successor operation. Neither is confirmed. No formal announcement has established that Flybondi will be dissolved, nor that its passenger business will be transferred to a carrier operating under a new brand. Travellers with Argentine domestic trips booked this spring should build their plans around another airline and treat any Flybondi flight that does operate as a bonus rather than a plan.

Sources: Buenos Aires Herald, TheStreet