Several major airlines in Vietnam have showed their ambitions toexpand their operations in many new international routes in the time tocome, according to an article published on the English language newswebsite dtinews.vn on April 8.

The national-flagship carrierplans to open several international flight routes this year, includingseveral routes to Japan such as Hanoi - Haneda, Danang - Tokyo, andDanang - Narita as well as one route from Vinh to Laos’ Vientiane.

Theairline plans to increase the frequency of several international routesin order to meet increasing market demand such as Hanoi - Fukuoka(Japan), Hanoi - Beijing (China), HCM City - Narita (Japan) and HCM City- Beijing.

Currently, Vietnam Airlines holds 40 percent of total international flights to Vietnam.
According to Vietnam Airlines, there is currently a fiercecompetition in the international aviation routes to Vietnam due to therecent mushroom of many aviation firms from the Middle East. Theserivals have advantages over local airlines as they own a wide flightroute network in many major cities in Europe. They often gatherpassengers in the Middle East to Vietnam with a frequency of sevenflights per week. Meanwhile, Vietnam Airlines currently has only fourflight routes to Western Europe including to Paris, London, Moscow andGermany’s Frankfurt.

Jetstar Pacific Airlines (JPA) also plans to expand their operations in foreign routes.

“We’lllaunch two new flight routes to Macau at the same time including Hanoi -Macau and Danang - Macau with a frequency of one flight per day. InApril, we also open more new international flight routes from Hanoi toChina’s Hong Kong, Thailand’s Bangkok, HCM City to Singapore and HCMCity to Hong Kong,” JPA’s General Director Le Hong Ha said.

Accordingto Ha, these are the busiest flight routes in the Southeast Asianregion but they are facing fierce competition with several stronginternational rivals like Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways, CathayPacific, and Air Asia.

In order to prepare for the plans, JPA hasbeen speeding up its restructuring process over the past year. It haschanged the old Boeing 777- 400 airplanes to more popular Airbus 320 inorder to save expense and to increase its competitiveness.

Meanwhile,VietJet Air (VJA) will launch many new international flight routes withduration time of less than three hours to Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong,China’s Kunming, Myanmar, the Republic of Korea’s Seoul, and Japan’sFukuoka and Osaka.

Flight routes to the Republic of Korea and Japan are expected to be opened in the second half of this year.

Initially,VJA is considering increasing the frequency of the Hanoi - HCM Cityflight route to 14 flights per week. Its capacity is expected tosignificantly increase when its joint venture with Thailand’s Kan Airstarts operation with five local flight routes and two to threeinternational flight routes in the South East Asian region.

Recently,VJA has signed a major contract to buy and hire a total of 100 new A320airplanes from Airbus. The delivery will be conducted from now onto2024.

The Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam said that allairports in the country welcomed over 40 million passengers including29.5 million passengers carried by local airlines in 2013.

Todate, 45 foreign airlines have opened flight routes to Vietnam with acombined 71 flight routes frequently to 22 countries and territories inthe world annually.-VNA