Yvo and utiketMalaysia

More low-cost airlines, better prices.

More low-cost airlines, better prices.

2 Jun 2011 23:00:00

Singapore Airlines announced last week it will start a new budget carrier for long-haul flights. It is expected to compete with other long-haul carriers here in Asia like AirAsia X and JetStar. Typically, a long-haul flight is over four hours long. Singapore Airline has not yet revealed a name or routes for this new carrier but it will be based in Singapore and start within a year.

Last month Thai Airways announced it will start a budget carrier too in a join venture with Tiger Airways to regain market share in the Thai domestic market which it has lost to Thai AirAsia. Thai Tiger will focus on short-haul flights within Thailand and a few international destinations.

The rebirth of Mandala Air as a low-cost carrier is another player reentering the low-cost market in Asia.

More competition is good news for us because more low-cost airlines mean lower prices. Data shows that the number of passengers flying with low-cost airlines will account for 20% of total travelers in Asia this year. That is ten times as much as a decade ago when only 2% of passengers used a low-cost airline. After AirAsia entered the low-cost market in 2002 passenger numbers skyrocketed and the big full-service carriers like Qantas, Malaysian Airlines and Singapore Airlines all started their own low-cost carriers.

Boeing biggest customer is now the Indonesian low-cost airline Lion Air which has ordered a massive amount of 180 Boeing 737�s. And soon there will be another three low-cost airlines.

Comparing and finding cheap tickets can be troublesome if you have to compare manually all 20 low-cost airlines here in Asia. So of course when these new airlines are flying you can get their flight data and compare their flight prices here on utiket.com, the low-cost flights finder!

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