Under the revised air services agreement, both countries’ carriers will immediately be able to operate 26,500 seats a week between Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to the major gateway cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth – an increase of 18 percent on the routes.
Since Etihad Airways commenced daily flights between Abu Dhabi and Melbourne in March 2009 the airline has carried more than 900,000 passengers on the route.
The airline believes its low fares will appeal to the large Singapore student population in Melbourne. According to data from the Australian Department of Education, there are 21,069 Singaporean students enrolled in education institutions in Victoria, as of September this year. They include students in university, pre-university courses, schools and non-award programmes.
At Routesonline we’ve decided to take a look back at a breaking article from the same time last year and revisit it 12 months later to see what’s happened since we released the news.
US major, United Airlines, has used the performance and range of the 787 to enable it to introduce non-stop flights between Los Angeles and Melbourne, the world's longest direct 787 flight. The city pair used to be served with a one-stop strategy via Sydney using a 777-200ER.
The total traffic for the four days is an increase of 36 per cent over the same period at the end of Eid Al Fitr in 2013, when 133,007 passengers took an Etihad Airways flight.
The expanded Brisbane schedule will boost capacity on the route by 2,166 seats a week and will support the growing demand for connectivity to North America from Queensland. North America is actually Queensland’s third largest tourism market and the increase in services support the 4.2 per cent increase in passenger numbers experienced in 2013.
