Thai Airways International will increase frequencies on its European, Australian and regional routes for the winter season but will add just one new route.

The winter programme, from Oct 31 through March 26, serves to underline the flag carrier’s strategy to cash in on traditional routes while avoiding risks and heavy startup capital involved in opening new routes.

Opening new routes is also constrained by aircraft capacity in spite of deliveries of a number of new Airbus 330-300s and the lease of three Boeing 777-300ERs from India’s Jet Airways earlier this year.

The only new route to be introduced is a daily service linking Bangkok and Haneda airport, Tokyo’s domestic airport which is opening up for international services, on Nov 1.

The winter plan endorsed by the THAI board calls for flights to 61 destinations in 34 countries with a total of 564 flights per week. Those are in addition to 10 domestic routes with a total of 287 flights per week.

Altogether, THAI will operate 851 flights a week in the winter schedule, which normally represents a capacity increase of 30-40% over the April-October schedule when travel demand is lower.

The routes on which THAI will step up frequencies are:

- Bangkok-Oslo to 7 flights a week from 5;

- Moscow to 4 flights from 3;

- Sydney to 18 flights from 14;

- Nagoya to 10 flights from 7;

- Fukuoka to 7 flights to 5;

- Kolkata to 7 flights from 5;

- Mumbai to 14 flights from 7.

Meanwhile, the airline saw an overall improvement in operation in the first seven months of this year.

Available seat per kilometre was 6.46% higher than the same period last year. Revenue per kilometre was 9.9% higher with cabin factor averaged 73.53%, a 3.21% increase.

For cargo and commercial mail, the available dead load tonne-kilometres was up 17.1%, revenue freight tonne-kilometres was 54% higher while the freight load factor averaged 62.15%, which was 31.5% higher.

source – www.bangkokpost.com