Korean Air Counts Down to Houston Launch

Korean Air is to further strengthen its position as one of the leading Asian carriers to serve the North American market by introducing a new non-stop link between its hub at Seoul’s Incheon International Airport and Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport in the US. This will be its 13th destination in North America, the most of any Asian carrier and the latest expansion will be complemented by frequency and capacity changes on other routes into the region.

The SkyTeam alliance member will inaugurate the four times weekly link between Seoul and Houston on May 2, 2014 and plans to utilise a Boeing 777-200 on the route. It will be the third Asian carrier to offer direct flights into Houston, the largest city in Texas and the fourth-largest city in the US after Singapore Airlines and Air China. Singapore Airlines has been serving the US city since 2008 via Moscow Domodedovo, while the Chinese flag carrier launched its own services in July last year and is already boosting frequencies to a daily operation from March 30, 2014 due to the initial success of the route.

“We're very bullish on the Americas,” said John Jackson, vice president of marketing for North and South America, Korean Air. “Houston is the fourth largest metro area in the US with a very strong travel market to Asia. We've decided to earn our fair share of the market with a highly competitive product and service that's hard to beat.”

Houston's dynamic economy and diverse population continue to strengthen its position on the world stage and the city is becoming a gateway destination and key player in the global marketplace. The addition of a new direct Transpacific service to South Korea is no real surprise, although many would have thought that given Star Alliance’s dominant position and hub status at Houston, that Korean Air’s rival, Asiana Airlines, may have been first to introduce the route.

According to our analysis below, Star Alliance accounted for 89.5 per cent of the departures and 87.1 per cent of the seat capacity from Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport in 2013, while SkyTeam had just 4.8 per cent and 5.0 per cent share, respectively.

However, Korean Air will be confident that its existing presence across the Americas will cater to the transfer demand and its brand recognition in the market means it can focus on point-to-point traffic, after all aside from being one of the largest population centers in the US, Houston's oil traffic draws significant flows of foreign visitors to the city, much of it high-yielding. The carrier already serves Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver and Washington DC across the Americas.

The launch of the Houston route will see Korean Air slightly reduce capacity to its other Texan market, Dallas, a destination it has been serving since the mid-1990s. The airline boosted its flights from Seoul Incheon to a daily operation last year after American Airlines launched on the city pair in spring 2013, but it will revert back to a more sustainable five times weekly offering from March 30, 2014; albeit overall capacity to Texas will rise when the Houston flights come on line from May 2014.

In the analysis below we look at the operations of Asian carriers in North America, based on seat capacity on departures from the region. The data shows that Korean Air is the dominant carrier with a 16.1 per cent share of the capacity in 2013. Its closest rivals are Cathay Pacific (13.0 per cent) and Japan Airlines (10.6 per cent), while Air China, which has grown its activities in North America over the last couple of years, had a 5.6 per cent share of the capacity in 2013, up 1.1 percentage points on 2012.