Anand Yedery.
Credit: Special Arrangement
On Monday, Hong Kong-based carrier Cathay Pacific announced the resumption of three non-stop weekly flights from Chennai. The airline, which has to date dominated the Hong Kong-India sector with Air India as the only other player, last operated its Chennai service four years ago. It will resume the service early next year with its Boeing 777 aircraft. The airline’s Regional Head of Customer Travel and Lifestyle - South Asia Middle East & Africa Anand Yedery spoke to DH’s Lavpreet Kaur on the airline’s latest routes and destinations and its expansion plans in the India and Asia market.
Edited excerpts.
Walk us through your India plan.
We have been in India for five decades now and we’ve been very focused on this market. Pre-pandemic we were operating almost 49 flights a week out of India with six ports and our endeavour will be to continuously review the opportunities in India. We started resumption with Mumbai and Delhi together in 2022, followed by our operations in Bengaluru. With twice daily flights into Delhi and 10 weekly flights into Mumbai, we have already reached our pre-Covid capacity. However, for Bengaluru, we are presently operating only four flights a week. We will resume our operations in Chennai from February 2024. For other markets like Hyderabad, we are in the process of rebuilding our capacity and will be operational in early 2024. We are very confident that by the end of 2024, we will be at 100 per cent of our pre-Covid capacity globally as a group, which includes Cathay Pacific and Hong Kong Express. India definitely tops our priority. There are many ports under review, I’m unable to share names at this moment.
How has the travel trend panned out in India and South Asia?
We’ve seen leisure actually really picking up much faster than what we anticipated. A lot of travellers today are planning multiple trips in a year. We have also seen new destinations really picking up faster than before. Markets like Vietnam and the Philippines came out as new markets, which weren’t really as big for leisure. Hong Kong also emerged as a preferred leisure destination for Indian travellers. Interestingly, we’re seeing a year-round demand for travel to Japan, which was traditionally a very seasonal market. The same is the case of Korea. These markets are shooting up on the back of demand from millennials or young professionals who want to explore new cultures and cuisines.
Going forward, which markets are you focusing on?
By the end of this year, we should be touching 80 destinations around the world. While we are a very Asia-driven airline, we are also heavily focused on markets like North America, be it to the West Coast (of the US) including San Francisco, Los Angeles or even Vancouver in Canada. In fact, pre-pandemic, our biggest markets out of Bengaluru and Chennai were to North America. Australia is also a very important market in the South West Pacific. A lot of people use Hong Kong as a transit hub with Cathay. With Hong Kong as a hub, we also offer intermodal connectivity, not just air-to-air connectivity but air-to-sea, especially to the southern part of China.
Just last month, we resumed our flight operations into Johannesburg, South Africa. In the winter schedule, towards the end of October, we are looking at resuming our flight operations into Christchurch, which is a seasonal service. We will operate four flights a week from Hong Kong to Christchurch. Similarly, we are also looking at adding in Chicago.
How has the demand been for your passenger and cargo services?
In the first seven months of 2023, the number of passengers carried increased by 1,622 per cent against an 818.9 per cent increase in capacity and we saw a 1,149 per cent increase in revenue passenger kilometres, as compared with the same period in 2022. The airline carried 115,729 tonnes of cargo this July, an increase of 14.9 per cent compared with July 2022.
Demand from India has been high. There has been a pent-up demand initially, especially from students, leisure travellers and even those visiting friends and relatives. We’ve been fairly optimistic about the kind of share we have been able to capitalise on from cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. India was the seventh-largest country, by market share, for Cathay Pacific in 2019.