Australia--HAVING launched into its third Australian market with a new A330, AirAsiaX is now hunting for its fourth destination. The Kuala Lumpur-based airline started four-weekly services to Melbourne on Wednesday after recently starting services to Perth.
It already operates to the Gold Coast and Sydney is its next obvious target.
AirAsiaX chief executive Azran Osman-Rani said the airline would be looking at a fourth Australian destination "pretty soon", but declined to specify.
Noting that the airline wanted to fly to all the major cities, he agreed Sydney was a possibility if the airline could make a service work "with the limitations of the airport".
AirAsiaX also announced this week that it was axing all fuel surcharges on its fares to Kuala Lumpur.
Mr Osman-Rani said the move, like the airline's sales fares, was designed to encourage people to travel.
"We do want people to keep travelling, even in these more challenging economic times, and we've always believed that lower fares will get people to travel when they would not normally think of travelling," he said.
Mr Osman-Rani agreed the financial crisis was starting to feed through to the real economy, but said he expected the impact on AirAsiaX to be neutral.
He said the outlook for the next three or four months was "quite robust".
"There will be segments of passengers who may have travelled with us but during this time would be cutting back," he said.
"Then there also people who would have travelled with full-service carriers but are perhaps more price conscious, so they are gravitating to us. And that's why we're seeing more people at our low-cost terminal in KL."
The airline hopes to upgrade its Melbourne services to daily for the peak Christmas season and launch permanent daily flights to the Victorian capital from March.
It also plans to start services the Britain in March and still hopes to offer sub-$1000 return fares to and from Australia. Mr Osman-Rani said this would boost volumes on the Australian routes.
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