One of Virgin Australia’s four shortlisted bidders pledged to keep the airline a full-service operator.
Its future is best served as a full-service airline to compete directly with Qantas, says Cyrus Capital.
New York based Cyrus has experience of the Virgin brand having partnered with Richard Branson in the past.
Cyrus was an investor in Virgin America, which was eventually bought out by Alaska Airlines in 2016 for $2.6 billion.
Cyrus aims to keep Virgin ‘roughly the same size’ and only cut a few under-performing regional routes, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Cyrus’ ambition for Virgin is in sharp contrast to rival bidder Indigo Partners.
Indigo’s expertise is in low cost operations and has interests in a number of LCCs including Wizz Air, Frontier Airlines and Volaris.
Bain Capital, another firm with close ties to Richard Branson, also has plans to go down the low cost business model route if selected as buyer.
Cyrus Capital has indicated that it would restructure Virgin’s fleet by ditching its wide body fleet and replace them with Boeing Dreamliners.
The next step is for administrators Deloitte to whittle down the shortlist to two bidders by the end of the week.
