As a result of that the number of Scandinavian and American tourists to Malaysia has increased drastically during 2006, and in support of the campaign Visit Malaysia 2007 the national airline the national carrier will retain the Kuala Lumpur-Stockholm-Newark return route in its international network beyond 15 January 2007.
Malaysia Airlines had earlier announced to cease flight operations on this route but will now continue operating its thrice weekly flights on Monday, Thursday and Saturday using a 282-seater Boeing B777-200 aircraft. From Stockholm the flight depart for Malaysia on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
In clarifying the decision to maintain this route, Malaysia Airlines Managing Director/CEO Mr. Idris Jala said, “Our earlier decision was guided by the initial findings from our route profitability exercise. However in response to a call from the government to reconsider our decision, we reviewed this route.”
“We have now teamed up with Tourism Malaysia to aggressively market Visit Malaysia Year (VMY) 2007 in these two markets and we now have very encouraging forward booking enquiries for next year”, he added.
In addition, Malaysia Airlines also received encouraging consideration and support from the airport authorities for the continued ‘Malaysian’ presence at Arlanda, Stockholm and Newark , USA .
”We are delighted over this decision by Malaysian Airlines staying on the Scandinavian market and confident it is the right thing to do. It’s a good and popular route with a high numbers of passengers,” said Mats Sigurdson at Swedish Civil Aviation Authority, who will decrease the landing fees for airlines in 2007.
For the months of January to July this year, there was a 16.8% increase of tourist arrivals in Malaysia from the US and similarly, there was a 20.8% increase from the Scandinavian region. Based on this trend, tourist arrivals from these two markets is expected to further increase during VMY 2007 and Malaysia Airlines will leverage on this anticipated demand for the profitability of KLIA-Stockholm-Newark route.
“To further boost ‘leisure focused and business interested’ traffic arrivals and increase our passenger loads, we are also pursuing various options to increase connectivity. For KLIA-Stockholm, we will increase the use of our existing code-share option with KLM to provide additional connectivity between Kuala Lumpur and Stockholm via Amsterdam ,” added Idris Jala.
The national carrier will continue to enhance efforts to promote inbound traffic into Malaysia from the USA and the Scandinavian region for VMY 2007.
