AirAsia X, the
long-haul arm of AirAsia, Asia’s largest low cost airline has announced it will
drop flights to Christchurch, New Zealand as part of the carrier’s plan to
realign its network to meet demand better.
This move comes
after the carrier withdrew flights from Kuala Lumpur to London Gatwick, Paris,
Mumbai and New Delhi. The airline claims that dropping unprofitable routes is a
way to improve cost efficiency and will allow them to focus on the carrier’s
“core markets of Australia, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Iran.”
Air Asia’s
sister company, Thai Air Asia has also dropped the Bangkok – Delhi route.
An editor of the
Business Traveller, Alex McWhirter previously predicted that the low-cost
long-haul model is difficult to sustain. "To date, every long-haul budget
carrier has failed, witness People Express of the US in the 1980s and more
recently Hong Kong’s Oasis and Canada’s Zoom," he states. With AirAsia X
slowly chopping off unprofitable long-haul routes and concentrating on mainly
medium-haul routes, the question of whether the carrier will be able to
continue as AirAsia's long-haul, low-cost arm remains to be seen.
I flew on from Stansted
to KLIA on Air Asia once, I was quite happy with the experience and the plane
(A330) seemed quite full. Sigh.
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