News Backgrounder
Government opens Haneda to local LCCs
February 1st 2015
Japan’s low-cost carrier (LCC), Peach Aviation, will notch up another victory when it becomes Japan’s first LCC to offer international flights from Tokyo’s downtown airport, Haneda. Read More »
From the northern hemisphere summer, Kansai-based Peach will operate a scheduled daily service between Haneda and Taipei’s Taoyuan International Airport, using vacant overnight slots. Taiwan is a huge market for Japanese travel.
Until late last year, Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), regarded LCCs as predominantly leisure carriers that were only allowed to operate from Narita, a long journey from downtown Tokyo. Full service airlines are regarded by regulators as business travel oriented and are favored when international slots are allocated at convenient Haneda airport, which is 14 kilometres from central Tokyo.
However, of the 40 slots available daily at Haneda, from 11pm to 6 am, only 26 (65%) have been taken up, mainly because of limited late night access to the airport. The MLIT has nothing to lose by offering them to willing LCCs. To date, the only other LCC using Haneda is Hong Kong Express.
Peach is taking advantage of an MLIT program, introduced last November, intended to attract airlines to Haneda with lower late night and early morning landing fees. The incentive package offers carriers a 50% reduction in the first year, 30% in the second year and 20% in year three.
Even so, the MLIT has been cautious about granting Haneda slots to LCCs because it does not want to erode Narita’s standing as an international airport. But having approved the Peach flights, it has set a precedent and may be forced to formulate a more LCC transparent policy.
In a recent interview in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, MLIT minister, Akihiro Ota, said he would accept LCC applications to use late night slots at Haneda “to make the most of the airports in the Tokyo metropolitan area”. His main concern, he said, is to attract more foreign tourists to Japan through better inbound access.
Other Haneda slot issues remain. Valuable daytime slots are idle. Slots not taken up by U.S. carriers that are going spare can be used for international charters up to nine times daily in summer 2015, so long as the destinations are cities without scheduled services and are operated from Haneda.
Other Haneda slots planned for increasing frequencies on the Tokyo-China route have now become available as diplomatic relations between the two countries deteriorated. They will be used, temporarily, for domestic flights.
Peach, launched in 2012, operates from its original Kansai hub as well as a more recently established base in Naha (Okinawa), which will be used to develop a Southeast Asian network for the LCC.
This year, Peach will move into the Kanto region, in Greater Metropolitan Tokyo and commence flights out of Narita to Hokkaido (Sapporo) in northern Japan and Fukuoka in western Japan from March.
