Singapore – Austrian is coming online in Singapore from June 2, shifting its twice-weekly flights to Melbourne from Vienna via Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) to the Lion City, and adding one more frequency to boot.

But KLIA does not lose out as Austrian is increasing its Vienna-Sydney connections via Malaysia from four to five a week.

The carrier is banking on growing corporate traffic to central and eastern Europe to support its plan to target the premium sector strongly.

Executive board member and COO, Mr Josef Burger, said: “The strategic concept behind that is not only to provide time-saving and convenient connections between Singapore and Vienna, but very importantly, to use Vienna as a hub to central and east European destinations and secondary destinations within the rest of Europe.”

The airline will deploy a Boeing 777 configured with 42 seats in business and 302 seats in economy class on the route.

The Austrian Group has a strategic long-haul focus for the South-east Asian market, with a plan to take traffic to, from and beyond Singapore. “We also have a clear focus on the short- to medium-haul. We consider ourselves the number one specialist to central and Eastern Europe, which we call the New Europe. No other airline operates more flights to the region than we do. We connect Vienna to 36 destinations there.”

“It is in business opportunities arising from the New Europe that we will see most growth, because there is demand from corporate travellers. Business people are really going to these markets. We will be offering very good value-for-money in business class.”

The carrier is also introducing flights to Shanghai in June and increasing its Vienna-Beijing connections from three to six for the summer schedule.

Austrian carried about 200,000 in the region in 2003. Of these, three to four thousand flew between Kuala Lumpur and Europe, 26,000 between Kuala Lumpur and Australia, and 151,000 between Europe and Australia.

It expects the new services via Singapore to carry about 62,000 passengers over the first seven months of operations (13,000 from Europe to Singapore, 9,200 from Singapore to Australia, and 40,000 from Europe to Melbourne).

Mr Burger said: “We expect to run at higher loads in 2004, and carry about 215,000 passengers through KLIA. Last year, the average load factors were about 81 per cent. Present developments show volume coming back. But there is lots of pressure on yield, and we believe it will never go where it has been before, because price sensitivity will continue from consumers and competition is increasing." Fares at the peak are about RM3,500 (US$921) between KLIA and Europe.