Airline News
Tokyo/Haneda airport expands China slots
October 30th 2015
Tokyo’s downtown Haneda Airport has steadily expanded from mostly domestic flights into a full-fledged international airport in the past five years. Read More » China, in particular, is making the effects of its bulging economic muscle felt in the skies over Japan, and Haneda is responding to the soaring number of Mainland visitors. With the change to the winter schedule last weekend, the airport's daytime slots for flights to and from the Mainland increased sharply to a 140 per week, the Nikkei Asian Review reported.
In August, some 590,000 passengers travelled from China to Japan, a 2.3-fold jump from a year earlier, according to the Japan National Tourist Organization. An All Nippon Airways (ANA) representative told the Nikkei Review that ANA flights between Japan and China were running with an approximately 85% load factor, higher than its U.S. and Europe routes, the airline’s traditional cash cows.
In response to the growing demand, the transport ministry decided to expand Haneda-China links and implemented a plan that had been suspended for some time due to strains in the relationship between the two countries. However, Beijing may not be using the new slots in the way Tokyo thought. The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has largely allocated them to budget and lesser-known carriers unfamiliar to Japanese tourists, such as Spring Airlines and Juneyao Airlines, while ANA and Japan Airlines (JAL) have launched twice-daily Haneda-Beijing and Haneda-Shanghai services, focusing on their core competencies of serving the full-service market. Some observers believed China's move could blur the line between the differentiated roles of both Tokyo airports – one for the long-haul and the budget segment (Narita), the other for domestic and high-frequency regional trunk routes (Haneda) – envisioned by the Japanese government.
