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Singapore Airlines (SIA) will add around 4,700 seats between Singapore and Australia from next year.
The Singaporean national carrier will phase in changes to its Australian routes from March 2024, including increased capacity to Adelaide, Cairns, Darwin, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne, to meet a rise in demand for international travel via SIA’s hub at Changi Airport.
Upcoming changes include the use of A350-900 planes for flights to Cairns; restoration of pre-COVID-19 scheduling to Darwin, including daily 737-8 flights; a fourth daily service to Perth using A350-900s; replacing the A350-900 on SQ241/SQ242 to Sydney with the 777-300ER, offering Sydney passengers first-class options; replacing the A350-900 on SQ279/SQ278 to Adelaide with the 787-10; and the reinstatement of a fifth daily Melbourne service from May.
“These changes provide more capacity and connectivity to SIA’s global network via the iconic and popular Singapore Changi hub,” said Singapore Airlines regional vice president South West Pacific, Louis Arul.
“SIA remains committed to ensuring capacity matches the high levels of demand we continue to see.”
The changes, which are subject to regulatory approval, follow an announcement in May that SIA would boost services to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth airports over the end-of-year peak.
These new and expanded services will add at least 7,000 seats per week between Australia and Singapore over the December/January period, with Arul saying the move was in response to anticipated high demand.
“The appetite for travel has been robust over the current mid-year holiday period and signs are that demand will remain elevated as we head into the traditionally strong year-end peak,” he said.
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says:It’s hard to think that QF will ever regain market leadership on its home turf when you look at what the competition is actually doing, in particular SQ at CNS with it’s A350-9 coming there next year. It’s not a case of why didn’t QF do something similar but simply QF can’t because it doesn’t have the equipment to achieve it and again, that is because of their total failure to re-equip as was required and that failure dates back at least 25 years! You have only to look at our friends and neighbours, Fiji and N.Z. and their equipment upgrades, the latter awaiting delivery of another B777-300ER to see how and where they are going; – on and up; QF on the other hand scrapping/storing 2 perfectly good A380’s when they could be satisfying consumer demands and earning revenue, not costing as and where they are. Surely not everyone/all in the decision making group had the same opinion, maybe there was no group. That does not matter now, what does though is what are we going to do to fix the problem? – it took us 25 odd years to get here and the change aint gonna happen anytime soon. Now I know that in QF when there was a problem it is not why? but who? – at this time we need someone to stand up and put forward their objective vision of the way ahead because if not, we are in a cul-de sac.
It will be interesting to see how the SQ A350 goes at CNS, clearly they are targeting the air freight market nominating Seafood but CNS mainly fishes for Prawns, TSV is the seafood capital of the north which is about 4 hours away by truck, – I am sure that the farmers on the tablelands will be planting more Chinese vegetables (yum) and similar so well done SQ, as they say, you have dun good.