Partnering up

Asia LCC’s are no longer going it alone

Let’s dance. That seems to be the latest development on Asia’s low-cost airline landscape. Many of the region’s budgeteers – there are more than 50, some of them struggling to survive in an extremely competitive marketplace – are looking for partners to boost their networks, lift passenger numbers and stave off the prospect of bankruptcy.

Going it alone is increasingly becoming something the low-cost carriers (LCCs), or hybrids, don’t want to do. And the May launch of Value, the world’s first major LCC alliance (see separate story) involving seven no-frills operators – Tiger Airways and Scoot in Singapore, Tigerair Australia, the Philippines’ Cebu Pacific Air and its subsidiary Cebgo, Korea’s Jeju Air and Japan’s Vanilla Air – seems to have sparked off a trend.