Many airlines cut flights to Vietnam

Financial difficulties and the global economic recession have forced international airlines and Vietnam Airlines to reduce service from and to Vietnam.

International airlines have cut down their summer flight schedule schedule to Vietnam in response to decreasing demand for air travel, a consequence of the global economic recession, says to the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV).

Vo Huy Cuong, Head of CAAV’s Air Transport Division, on April 28 told the press that preliminary statistics show a year over year decrease in international flights to and from Vietnam of four percent from the end of March to October.

According to Cuong, airlines which have reduced service to Vietnam include Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways and Thai Air Asia.

Cuong said that Thai Air Asia has reduced the daily flight frequency on its Hanoi–Bangkok route from three flights a day to two. However, Air Asia has added four flights a week to its HCM City–Bangkok service.

Summarizing, Cuong said that growth of Vietnam’s aviation market will slow down because the global economic recession has reduced dramatically the demand for travel by air.

Not only foreign airlines have cut flights to Vietnam, said Cuong. Vietnam Airlines has also cut down international flights. For example, the national flag carrier has cut two flights to Busan, South Korea.

In its business report for the first quarter of 2009, Vietnam Airlines wrote that it is suffering impacts of the global economic recession. The air carrier said that the biggest difficulty is that passenger and cargo transport market has shrunk overall by 1.7% compared to the same period of 2008, and the international market is down by 9.3%.

In the first quarter of 2009, Vietnam Airlines carried 2.26mil passengers, a decrease of 5% over the same period of the last year. These include 866,970 international passengers, nine percent less than a year ago.

There is also positive news for Vietnam’s aviation market, however. Shanghai Airlines will begin thrice-weekly service between Hanoi and Shanghai this summer. From June 1, Northwest Airlines will fly daily from HCM City to destinations in the US via Tokyo, becoming the second US air carrier to serve Vietnam.

EL Al, the Israeli flag carrier, will appoint a general agent in Vietnam in early May. It expects this will help push the sale of air tickets for its flights from Bangkok, Hong Kong and Beijing to Tel Aviv and beyond.