Posted February 19, 2009 2:44 PM
By Alud Davies
Setting up a LCC in North East Asia, who's in?
Recently I'd decided that it was high time I went to visit a friend of mine in Barcelona, a beautiful city I'm sure you'll agree. Working at Heathrow as I do, a flight from here on a Thursday night, returning on the Sunday night seemed like the perfect option. However, on checking my bank account it seemed like taking an LCC was a better option and a check again later before I booked the ticket confirmed that walking was my only option.
Of course, I'm not alone in the position. As we slide deeper into a period of global uncertainty people who need, and want to travel will naturally look for cheaper alternatives to full service airlines. Oh yes it's true, someone, somewhere is making money!
Think of truly large LCC's with extensive route networks and large fleets of aircraft and really there are only 4 major players, the US has 1 with Southwest, Europe has 2 with easyjet and Ryanair, and Southeast Asia has 1 with AirAsia.
Which leaves a couple of areas. The Middle East is coming along quite nicely as is Latin America, but the one place that crying out for an LCC of their own is North East Asia.
So I've got this idea of setting up an LCC in North East Asia and maybe you can help. Everywhere sexy in Asia can be reached in 4 hours or less from HK so that seems like the obvious place to base ourselves. We will need some aircraft, 30x A320's (or 737-800's - wouldn't want to seem biased at this stage!) would do the trick and we can take 10x aircraft over a 3 year period to build things up.
Hmm, but where to fly? Well let’s start with some of the more obvious choices for year 1 in no particular order:
Hong Kong > Tokyo
Hong Kong > Seoul
Hong Kong > Singapore
Hong Kong > Beijing
Hong Kong > Shanghai
Hong Kong > Bangkok
Hong Kong > Manila (not Clark!)
Hong Kong > Jakarta
Hong Kong > Taipei
Each of these destinations we can fly to at least double daily, leaving an aircraft on the ground overnight in each destination to operate a return leg early the next morning.
Schedule wise we will need to have flight times that appeal to business users and tourists alike so let use Hong Kong > Seoul as a sample, not forgetting that South Korea is an hour ahead of Hong Kong:
08:00 Depart Hong Kong (HKG)
12:30 Arrive Seoul (ICN) Duration: 3h 30mins
14:00 Depart Seoul (ICN)
16:50 Arrive Hong Kong (HKG) Duration: 3h 50mins
18:30 Depart Hong Kong (HKG)
22:30 Arrive Seoul (HKG) Duration: 3h 30mins
08:00 Depart Seoul (ICN)
12:50 Arrive Hong Kong (HKG) Duration: 3h 50mins
This will allow the aircraft to enter the system back in Hong Kong on day 2 and be used on flights with shorter sector lengths.
So that's year 1 sorted. Year 2 we can add service to the better performing routes on the network and expand into China, leaving year 3 for more leisure orientated destinations like the fabulous Islands around Malaysia and Thailand.
So who's in? I can probably scrape together a couple of hundred dollars, meaning you'd have to find a few billion, but as you've put in the most I'll even let you pick our airline name :-)
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