December 1st 2021

Print Friendly

July

The off-again, on-again status of the proposed air travel bubble between Singapore and Hong Kong received another setback when a surge in COVID-19 community transmissions in Singapore led to a hold on discussions until case numbers fell. Read More » The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Singapore said they would be “taking stock” of the situation in late August. The proposed air travel bubble had been delayed three times since it was launched in November last year.

Separately, Singapore said it was working to establish quarantine-free travel by September, the month when vaccination rates were expected to reach 80% of the island state’s six million residents.

This would have been most welcome news at Singapore Airlines (SIA), which this month reported a net loss of S$409 million (US$302.3 million) for the three months to June 30, albeit an improvement from a net loss of S$1.1 billion in the same period in 2020. The growing pace of vaccinations in many countries provided “hope for a further recovery in international air travel demand”, it said.

In Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific Group announced a reshuffle of some of its management team with director commercial, Lavinia Lau, appointed director customer travel. Asia Miles CEO and general manager of customer relationship and retail, Paul Smitton, is the director of the newly created customer lifestyle business line. Lawrence Fong was promoted to director digital and IT from group general manager digital and information technology.

There were 12 million Australian residents under stay-at-home orders this month because of COVID-19 outbreaks in the country’s two largest cities of Melbourne and Sydney. In addition to smashing domestic demand, another consequence was the suspension of quarantine-free travel between Australia and New Zealand.

ANA HOLDINGS INC., the parent company of All Nippon Airways (ANA), reported a net loss of 51.2 billion yen (US$467 million) for the three months to June 30, compared with a net loss of 108.8 billion yen in the matching months of 2020. The improved result was underpinned by its cargo business and cost-cutting measures.

IndiGo CEO, Ronojoy Dutta, said the Indian carrier was focused on adding capacity to get back to pre-COVID-19 levels as quickly as possible as the impact of the devastating wave of COVID-19 infections across India earlier in the year subsided. IndiGo reported a 31.7 billion rupee (US$426 million) net loss for the three months to June 30, a deterioration from a net loss of 28.4 billion rupee 12 months earlier. Dutta hoped the LCC would be at 100% of pre-COVID domestic capacity by the end of the year.