Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong’s flag carrier, is open to more tie-ups with Indian carriers, Mark Sutch, Regional General Manager for South Asia, West Asia and Africa, told BusinessLine . The airline already has interline agreements — commercial agreements between airlines which ease passenger travel through one to another — with Air India and Jet Airways.
“The Indian aviation market is growing faster than anywhere else in the world,” Sutch said. “We’re making real investments in India and increasing capacity by flying bigger planes since we can’t increase frequency. There are government-to-government bilateral agreements between India and Hong Kong and we’ve reached where we can with that.”
Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon currently operate 48 weekly flights from six cities in India to Honk Kong. While being restricted from increasing frequency by these bilateral agreements, Cathay is now choosing to fly bigger planes with more capacity. From October, for instance, it will fly the Boeing 777 aircraft on the Mumbai-Hong Kong route instead of the Airbus A330, which increases seating capacity by 21 per cent and offers significantly more belly capacity for carrying cargo.
“We’re looking for opportunities in interline agreements too,” Sutch added. “Low-cost airlines, at the moment, don’t seem to be keen on it but there are airlines like easyJet in the UK which see the benefits of teaming up with a legacy airline.”
Sutch said India is Cathay’s largest cargo market outside of the US in terms of freighter capacity. It has scheduled freighter services to and from Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, mostly carrying electronic devices and telecom equipment inwards from the Chinese market. “Hong Kong-India is not a big trade lane but we try to go beyond that to China, the US and Australia, making multiple stops and trying to maximise efficiency.”
In recent quarters, Cathay has been struggling with losses and is in the midst of a restructuring programme, which included cutting 600 jobs. It reported a loss of $262.07 million in the first half of this year, its worst in a decade, as it deals with lower cost competitors from mainland China which are aggressively expanding into international routes.
“India is one of our top 10 markets and is a massive contributor to overall revenue,” Sutch said. “Right now, we’re working on getting our brand right, doing our internal transformation as an organisation and pricing the product right.”
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.