Photo in story shows Southwest, story mentions China Air
Well there are currently no flights to Hawai’i on China Airlines. The story is simply that some representatives from Hawai’i visited Taiwan and hoped that CI will resume direct flights which have not been a thing since the COVID emergency. Currently, as some forumosans may know, we need to transfer in Japan or Korea or the Philippines to get there; the Hawai’i side wants more tourists and thinks that nonstop flights would help.
Guy
And makes sense
I’d think that CI would be more interested in restarting the Delhi route than the Honolulu one, which would be leisure heavy with one presumes less business class travel.
Disclaimer: I have no inside information about this matter; this is simply my speculation.
Guy
yeah, my wife indeed had to go through BKK with TG for her biz trip to DEL.
Well, since JX likes the states so much they can consider that haha
CI used to fly to HNL, just like they used to fly to DEL. I’m sure they’d like to resume flights to both places, but the thing right now is aircraft utilization. There may be an opportunity cost for resuming this route, over just adding frequencies on existing routes. The constraint now for many airlines is just the number of planes they have available.
Maybe an opportunity for Starlux being a new player
But Honolulu is probably not that successful a route that’s why it stopped so many times
Probably mostly big with Japanese but it takes about 8 hours from Tokyo I believe but 10 hours from Taipei
And a Japanese customer from Tokyo will have to fly near three hours to Taipei for the 10 hour flight after a layover
You can see how this wouldn’t be popular
And you probably can’t use a smaller plane because it won’t have the range unless you reduce the number of seats further
On the other hand maybe that’s the trick for Starlux
Use one of their A320 and try the route
Or if they can use fifth freedom and fly there through Tokyo or Osaka or maybe a third big Japanese city currently with no direct to Honolulu as long as they are allowed to pick up and drop off customers in Japan that might work the market could be big enough
Even for the Japanese, fewer are going to Hawaii with it being so expensive, hotels in T$10,000+ range (I just stay at cousins home to cut costs).. flew Alaskan-Hawaii Air last time , aeroplane was half full (non good for the airline).
Meanwhile on Southwest Airlines, pilot seems does not like California Bay Area
