China's top budget carrier Spring Airlines to ramp up international routes amid tourism boom

Catering to China’s ongoing outbound tourism boom, Spring Airlines, the country's leading no-frills airline, is accelerating its overseas expansion, it said on Thursday. 

It currently flies to 30 cities, nearly half of which are in mainland China. About 30 per cent of its flights are to other Asian destinations, and nearly one-third of its tickets are sold via its mobile app.

But frustrated by increasingly frequent bottlenecks and delays at major Chinese air gateways like Shanghai and Guangzhou, the airline plans to quickly add more routes to foreign shores, one of its senior executives said.

“Recently, [demand for] our regional flights to Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia has increased dramatically,” Wang Yu, the airline’s vice president, told the South China Morning Post on Thursday. 

It does not serve the Chinese capital due to a capacity crunch at Beijing Capital Airport, the world’s second busiest. A new airport will open in the city in 2019.

China recorded 114 million outbound travellers last year, or less than 10 per cent of its 1.4 billion population, according to figures supplied by the company.