Carry on: Tigerair picks up Virgin's Australia-Bali routes

Tigerair picks up Virgin’s Australia-Bali services
Virgin Australia is pulling out of its leisure-oriented routes to Bali and Thailand in a bid to stem heavy losses of some $A69 million on its international operations.

The 25.9% Air New Zealand-owned airline will cut its Perth-Phuket operation from February and services from Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth to Bali from March.

The Bali services will be transferred to Virgin's budget offshoot Tigerair Australia from March 23 – Tigerair’s first international routes.

Virgin will redeploy some of the Boeing 737-800 aircraft it has used flying to Bali and Phuket to transtasman routes, including Sydney-Christchurch and Melbourne-Christchurch.

Three aircraft will be transferred to Tigerair, which has also announced additional domestic services between Sydney and Adelaide and Sydney and Cairns.

Virgin chief executive John Borghetti says the airline expects its international business to be profitable by the end of the 2016-17 financial year.

“The Virgin Australia group has delivered a significant improvement in performance for the 2015 financial year, which reflects the positive trajectory of the overall business,” he says.

Lufthansa enhances meal service in business
Lufthansa has introduced a “restaurant service” for long-haul business class passengers in its Airbus A380 flights over the Atlantic.

The German airline says this includes welcoming passengers by name, taking orders and setting tables with ceramic crockery, serving meals directly from the galley, and replacing trays and flight trolleys with service plates.

The service, which is already available on flights from Germany to New York and Miami, will also apply on superjumbo routes to Houston, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, Delhi, Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai, Seoul and Singapore.

The same service will be available in Boeing 747-400 and 747-8 flights from Frankfurt on October 1 and A340 routes from Frankfurt and Munich to Asia and the Middle East from October 25.

US v Gulf airlines battle heats up
A group of US air carriers have come out against any restrictions on Gulf-based airlines in the latest twist to the big battle of skies.

FedEx, Atlas Air Worldwide, Hawaiian Airlines and JetBlue say restrictions on three Middle Eastern airlines – Emirates, Etihad and Qatar – might harm national security interests.

The big three US airlines, United, American and Delta, backed by the labour unions, say they face unfair competition because of subsidies from the Gulf governments that control the airlines.

The other group of US carriers say any restrictions might provoke the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to respond with sanctions of their own, posing threats to US security interests in the Middle East.

Traffic rises 5/7% in June year
Global passenger traffic for June showed a 5.7% increase in demand (based on revenue passenger kilometres or RPKs) compared with a year earlier, Iata figures show. This was a slowdown compared with the 6.9% year-on-year growth recorded in May, in part owing to the timing of Ramadan, which depressed travel demand in the Middle East. June capacity (available seat kilometres or ASKs) climbed 6.0%, and load factor dipped 0.2 percentage points to 81.1%.

LATAM launches new logo
The LATAM Group, which is a merger of Chile’s LAN Airlines and its affiliates in Peru, Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador with Brazil’s TAM, has adopted a new logo and consolidated all of its brands under the one name.

It is the largest airline in South America and one of the largest in the world. It flies to New Zealand daily from Santiago to Auckland in a flight that also goes to Sydney.

The LATAM network has a total of 140 passenger destinations in 24 countries, with an even bigger cargo network. The overall fleet has 318 aircraft and the company has 53,000 employees.

Emirates signs deal with Bangkok Airways
Emirates has signed a codeshare agreement with Thailand-based Bangkok Airways, significantly expanding its network in Southeast Asia. The new deal will see Emirates add its code to 19 Bangkok Airways routes in the region.

It will also add 14 more cities to Emirates’ global network, allowing it to connect passengers to new tourist destinations such as Koh Samui and Chiang Mai in Thailand, Siem Reap in Cambodia, and Yangon and Mandalay in Myanmar.

In addition, Emirates says the codeshare will help provide better connectivity to passengers from Australia and New Zealand.