Budget airline Scoot to start Hong Kong-Singapore flights

Scoot, a Singaporean long-haul low-cost carrier, will join the competitive Hong Kong-Singapore route from November, banking on the growing popularity of budget airlines in Asia.

The airline will compete with its parent Singapore Airlines and sister company Tigerair on this route, alongside Cathay Pacific Airways and United Airlines. The leg is already served by five carriers with more than 20 return services a day.

"We have had the same situation on the Singapore-Bangkok and Singapore-Sydney routes where we are doing quite well," Scoot chief executive Campbell Wilson said yesterday.

Hong Kong has long been on the radar but Scoot has to wait until the arrival of its sixth Boeing 777 plane in November to kick off the service.

Scoot will operate an early-morning flight from Hong Kong to Singapore and return with a red-eye flight from November 15. The indicative airfare for the new service is HK$750 per trip, which Scoot says is 70 per cent cheaper than full-service carriers and 30 per cent lower than other low-cost carriers.

The promotional fares would be even lower, depending on the number of clicks that their Facebook website is able to register from Hong Kong.

The percentage of seats sold is expected to be 80 per cent on the route.

The low-cost carrier expects 15 to 20 per cent of passengers from Hong Kong to fly via Singapore to 50 other destinations in the Scoot network and its partners Tigerair and Singapore Airlines. It expects to fly beyond Hong Kong to some unspecified Japanese cities under the fifth freedom air rights granted by the authorities.

Scoot is now operating five Boeing 777-200s to 11 cities in mainland China and Australia, along with Tokyo and Seoul via Taiwan as well as Bangkok.

By 2015, it will take delivery of 11 B787s and replace all of the B777s, which now have an average age of 15 years. The new aircraft would burn 25 per cent less fuel per seat than the 777.

Fuel accounts for half of its operating costs. The new aircraft, each with 320 to 350 seats compared with 402 seats in the old aircraft, will help the company become profitable. But Wilson declined to say when the company expected to return profits.