IT IS a tough year for the airline industry, but Singapore carriers seem to be holding up.
Even as others are cutting capacity, grounding planes and laying off staff, low-cost carrier Tiger Airways is gearing up for expansion.
Jetstar Asia and Singapore Airlines (SIA) have also managed to fill a healthy number of seats.
The star, though, is Tiger.
Operating with a fleet of eight planes now, it expects to raise this to 12 by the end of next year, just as liberalisation opens up new routes to Malaysia and Indonesia.
Come December, for example, Tiger, which now flies once a day to Kuala Lumpur, will be able to launch an unlimited number of services.
Even before that, the airline will fly more often to other destinations: Next month, it will fly thrice daily to Bangkok, up from twice now; it will also land on the Thai resort island of Phuket twice a day, up from once now.
Tiger managing director Rosalynn Tay told The Straits Times yesterday: 'We are ramping up frequency because with more flights, we can offer our customers better connectivity as well as flexibility.'
Tiger, which has just turned four, has carried more than five million passengers to date.
Now that the business and its operating model are established, said Ms Tay, 'we expect it will take us just two to three years to record our next five million passengers'.
Tiger posted net earnings of $37.8 million - its first set of profits - for the year ended March 31.
Meanwhile, airlines around the world are staring at a total industry loss of US$5.2 billion (S$7.4 billion) this year on the back of high fuel prices - these have eased lately but remain volatile, slowing air traffic growth.
Jetstar Asia, running on a seven- plane fleet, recently increased its number of services to the Indonesian cities of Jakarta and Medan.
Although its number of seats filled per aircraft has come down by two to three percentage points, the figure remains healthy at above 70 per cent, said its chief executive officer Chong Phit Lian.
SIA, according to operating data for last month which was just released, filled an average of 79.4 per cent of seats across its network.
Although this was 2.2 percentage points lower than a year earlier, it is above the industry average.
In absolute terms, the airline carried more passengers last month than in August last year - 1.66 million versus 1.62 million. This comes partly from its five new Airbus A-380 superjumbos, each of which can carry 471 passengers, about 100 more than the Boeing 747 jumbo.
In recent months, SIA has also run more services to strong-performance markets like Moscow, Zurich, Paris, Milan and Barcelona in Europe; Sydney and Brisbane in Australia; and New Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore in India.
karam@sph.com.sg
This article was first published in The Straits Times on September 17, 2008.
