TMCnet News
Singapore/Thailand: Singapore-based Tiger Airways terminates daily flights between Singapore to Hat Yai(Thai Press Reports Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Section: Corporate News - The Singapore-based no-frills carrier Tiger Airways has terminated daily flights from Singapore to Hat Yai in a move that may undermine its bid to rebuild the southern Thai city's struggling tourism industry, the Bangkok Post reports. The route cancellation, which took effect last Sunday, has cut the last direct air link between the largest metropolitan area in southern Thailand with a foreign country as security concerns are growing with the proliferation of insurgent attacks in recent years. In June last year, AirAsia, the Malaysia-based low-cost carrier, suspended its daily service between Kuala Lumpur International Airport and Hat Yai International Airport after nine months of bumpy operations due to poor traffic demand on the route. Tiger Airways' termination of the Singapore-Hat Yai service will limit the flow of Singaporean tourists to the city, which is popular among Malaysians, Singaporeans and Indonesians. Tiger Airways officials said the decision to drop Hat Yai from its network has less to do with the poor load factor on the route than its strategy to shift aircraft capacity to support last month's launch of service to India, which offers more business potential. The airline is operating nine Airbus A320-200s, each capable of seating 180 passengers. It has won approval from Indian authorities to start flying to six cities in India: Chennai, Kochi, Goa, Trivandrum, Kolkata and Kozhikode. It has already started flights to Chennai and Kochi. Before its termination, Tiger Airways was reportedly carrying about 120 passengers on each flight. Tiger Airways' exit is bad new for Hat Yai's tourism industry, which is already reeling from a wave of rebel attacks. Two major bomb blasts in the past few years and the sabotage of railway tracks have deterred many tourists from visiting the city popular for its night entertainment and restaurants. The occupancy rate in hotels in Hat Yai dropped from an average of 65% to a low of 20% after the bombs in Sept 2006, which killed four and injured 82, according to the Thai Hotel Association of Hat Yai. Meanwhile, airlines operating domestic flights between Bangkok and Hat Yai will only increase route frequencies marginally as the outlook for incremental demand in the high season that started this month does not look promising. Only two budget carriers - Thai AirAsia and Nok Airlines - decided to increase flights on the route to six a day from five, starting at the end of last month, according to Hat Yai International Airport director Wicha Nernlop. Thai Airways International's three daily flights and One-Two-Go Airlines' two daily flights will continue throughout the high season. Hat Yai registered low growth in passenger throughput among the six major airports operated by the Airports of Thailand Plc (AoT) for the year ending in September. Passengers through Hat Yai inched up 3.28% year-on-year to 1.33 million, comprising 1.24 million domestic passengers (up 7.17%) and 94,612 international passengers (down 30.02%). Passenger traffic through Hat Yai was below its annual capacity of two million. Copyright 2007 Thai News Service, Source: The Financial Times Limited |