Air Busan to start Seoul flights

April 4th 2019

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Asiana’s LCC will grow in the capital in a bid to capture traffic rights. Read More »

Air Busan will soon start flying from Seoul in a bid to help parent owner Asiana Airlines secure more group traffic rights.

Asiana owns 44% of Air Busan, which has mostly flown from its namesake city of Busan, Korea’s second-largest. Air Busan has not flown internationally from Seoul. The change is mostly prompted by Asiana wanting to secure more group traffic rights.

Korea and China are expected to reach a deal to expand air services. The Korean government is expected to allocate traffic rights mostly to low-cost carriers and do so considering the performance of the airlines.

Asiana in 2016 established a wholly-owned LCC, Air Seoul, to capture LCC demand from Korea’s largest city after foreign and local LCCs grew. Jeju Air has more international flights from Seoul than its namesake home, Jeju.

Air Seoul would seemingly be Asiana’s right vehicle to receive Chinese traffic rights. But Air Seoul is apparently too young and small to be able to make a dent in the precious traffic right allocation. Air Seoul has mostly taken over existing Asiana flights using seven A321s previously flown by Asiana.

One encouraging sign for Asiana is that it prefaced group strategic alignment even though it does not have majority or total ownership in Air Busan.