ROUTES ASIA: Ten Years to Build a Gateway to Asia

A raft of Open Skies agreements, the arrival of the Airbus A380 and award-winning customer service is driving Incheon Airport’s route development strategy.

Incheon Airport celebrates its 10-year anniversary on March 29 and the gateway certainly has plenty of reasons to mark the occasion. Sandwiched between the world’s second and third largest economies of China and Japan, and itself forecast to be the world’s fourth richest country by 2040, South Korea is in an enviable position. This is something on which its main gateway has sought to capitalise over the past decade in its efforts to become a key North East Asia hub.

By all indications, it seems as if the gateway is well on its way to achieving its goal. More than a third of Incheon’s routes are to its two big neighbours, with 34 connections to cities in China, including economically important destinations like Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai. Its network also stretches to less well-known destinations, such as Shenyang, Harbin in the north and Hainan, known as ‘China’s Hawaii’.

A further 28 routes serve Japanese cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, the island of Okinawa, Hakodate and Miyazaki. Other Asian markets such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and, more recently, Hawaii, are also growing. Despite the fragile state of the global economy, the airport handled 33.4 million passengers in 2010, a 17.3 per cent increase on 2009. Of these, only 500,000 passengers were domestic travellers and the airport’s share of transit traffic has increased from 11.5 per cent in 2002 to 18 per cent today.

The A380 made its debut at Incheon in December 2009 with the launch of Emirates Airline’s services to Dubai. The aircraft is set to become a much more familiar sight at the airport from June this year, when Korean Air launches A380 services to Hong Kong and Tokyo and to Bangkok in July. Additional A380 aircraft deliveries later in the year will be utilised on long-haul US routes – New York from August and Los Angeles from October.

In a highly competitive regional market that includes some of the world’s biggest airports, how is Incheon managing to do so well? According to the airport’s Head of Route Development there are many reasons, but the key one has been the drive to make Incheon one of the most convenient, welcoming and best-connected gateways in Asia.

“Through our flag carriers, Asiana Airlines and Korean Air, we are trying to create a short-haul route network that spans the major cities in China and Japan. We want to offer passengers more ease than a domestic airport would, as well as more connections,” says Alex Lee, Director of Incheon Airport’s Aviation Marketing Group.

* Read the full article, in the latest edition of Routes News. A copy of the world air service development magazine is also in all delegate bags at Routes Asia and there are copies on the Routes News stand.