Dragonair has announced that its new four-times-weekly service to Kolkata will launch on November 2, 2012 offering more travel choices and greater convenience for passengers travelling between Hong Kong and Eastern India. The new service to be operated by an Airbus A320 aircraft and will be the carrier’s second destination in India, complementing its existing operation between Hong Kong and Bangalore.

In 2011 an estimated 776,000 O&D passengers travelled between Hong Kong and destinations across India. There are currently non-stop links from Hong Kong to four cities in India and alongside the Dragonair daily link to Bangalore, Cathay Pacific Airways offers flights to Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai, India’s Jet Airways offers links to Delhi and Mumbai, while Air India serve the Hong Kong – Delhi market. This month there are 183 departures offering over 52,000 seats in each direction.

The Hong Kong – Kolkata route has been previously served by both British Airways (BA) and Air India but there has been no non-stop scheduled links for almost 25 years. BA used to serve the sector as a weekly leg on its flights between London and Hong Kong during the first three months of 1982, while Air India offered a weekly link for a year between April 1987 and March 1988 using an Airbus A310.

In the last year around 26,000 O&D passengers travelled on the route with the main traffic flows being via Bangkok with Thai Airways International and Dhaka with Biman Bangladesh Airlines. Dragonair expects to supplement this demand with transfer traffic offering travellers the opportunity to connect through its Hong Kong hub to and from its Mainland China network as well as destinations in North America and Australia through seamless connections on the global network of sister airline Cathay Pacific.

Alongside its Indian expansion, Dragonair has revealed it will extend its flight to Chiang Mai in Thailand from a seasonal to a year-round operation. The Hong Kong carrier only launched the service in July but says that growing demand on the leisure route has pushed it to extend its operation Since April this year, Dragonair has launched or resumed services to Xi’an, Guilin, Jeju, Taichung, Clark in the Philippines and Chiang Mai, and a daily service to Haikou will resume on October 28, 2012. Kolkata will be the eighth destination added to the airline’s network this year.