Now a fully owned subsidiary of Virgin Australia, Tigerair Australia has recently undergone a major transformation – even ‘changing its stripes’ – in a bid to enhance its customer service and market fit.
The A380 will operate flights EY460/461, one of the airline’s twice daily Abu Dhabi - Melbourne services from June 1, 2016, substituting one of the three-class Boeing 777-300ER aircraft it currently deploys on the route. The move will increase the total number of two-way seats on the Melbourne-Abu Dhabi route by 26 per cent to more than 11,500 seats per week.
The airline will commence service between the capital and Otago’s biggest city from October 28, 2015 three-times-weekly, and will be Jetstar’s sixth domestic jet route in New Zealand.
The four-times-weekly link will commence on May 17, 2015 and will be the only direct service between the two cities, taking over from the current Delhi – Sydney – Melbourne triangular flight, which the airline currently operates.
The airline is lobbying for an increase in air traffic rights which will give it the option of daily flights to Sydney and Melbourne as well as servicing Brisbane and Perth.
Under the revised air services agreement, both countries’ carriers will immediately be able to operate 26,500 seats a week between Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to the major gateway cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth – an increase of 18 percent on the routes.
Since Etihad Airways commenced daily flights between Abu Dhabi and Melbourne in March 2009 the airline has carried more than 900,000 passengers on the route.
The airline believes its low fares will appeal to the large Singapore student population in Melbourne. According to data from the Australian Department of Education, there are 21,069 Singaporean students enrolled in education institutions in Victoria, as of September this year. They include students in university, pre-university courses, schools and non-award programmes.
At Routesonline we’ve decided to take a look back at a breaking article from the same time last year and revisit it 12 months later to see what’s happened since we released the news.
US major, United Airlines, has used the performance and range of the 787 to enable it to introduce non-stop flights between Los Angeles and Melbourne, the world's longest direct 787 flight. The city pair used to be served with a one-stop strategy via Sydney using a 777-200ER.
The total traffic for the four days is an increase of 36 per cent over the same period at the end of Eid Al Fitr in 2013, when 133,007 passengers took an Etihad Airways flight.
The expanded Brisbane schedule will boost capacity on the route by 2,166 seats a week and will support the growing demand for connectivity to North America from Queensland. North America is actually Queensland’s third largest tourism market and the increase in services support the 4.2 per cent increase in passenger numbers experienced in 2013.
