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Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines agree to far-reaching code-share
November 1st 2019
Joint business formed for Singapore-Malaysia flights. Read More »
Singapore Airlines (SIA) and Malaysia Airlines (MAS) have cemented a partnership following their signing of a Memorandum of Understanding in June.
Flights between Singapore and Malaysia will be operated under a joint business, subject to regulatory approval. This includes SIA subsidiaries, SilkAir and Scoot, as well as MAS subsidiary Firefly. Corporate travel programmes will be aligned and the two carriers said they were exploring ties between their frequent flyer programmes.
The partnership will leave AirAsia and Jetstar Asia as the major independent airlines in the Singapore-Malaysia market. AirAsia X this week filed schedules for double daily A330 flights between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. These will be in addition to AirAsia’s flights, but each AirAsia X A330 flight will have twice as many seats as an AirAsia A320 service. This maximises slot resources and could be an impetus for the AirAsia Group to continue to explore short-haul wide-body use, as Cebu Pacific and Scoot do.
MAS will code-share on SIA’s network beyond Singapore. Europe and South Africa are initial flagged markets, but the two airlines said they could add more markets later, also subject to regulatory review. SIA and SilkAir will code-share on MAS domestic Malaysian flights.
“This partnership is more than a conventional partnership. We believe in the mutual benefits for both airline groups and countries,” MAS CEO, Captain Izham Ismail, said.
