BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN

ROYAL Brunei Airlines (RBA) is planning to expand its presence in the China market following the decision to resume flights to Shanghai on March 28, an airline executive yesterday said.

Wong Peng Hoon, senior vice-president for Commercial Yield and Planning at RBA, said, “In every study that we see, China is the market with the highest growth. In fact in our research, China will still be the highest growth market for the next 20 years, and there is no way we are going to miss that.”

He told The Brunei Times bookings for the RBA flight to Shanghai during the first day of the launch were overwhelming and remained very strong for the whole week.

But he declined to divulge the actual number of tickets sold, saying it was still too early to reveal any figures.

“There are still many days to the first flight, and we’ll get a better picture of the general market climate come the end of March.”

Asked whether RBA will increase the flights to Shanghai from the four per week during the Shanghai World Expo from May to October, Wong said the airline will have to gauge the demand before making any decision. “It will be decided by market forces,” he said. “Like May 8 is Brunei Day at the World Expo, and there are already a lot of groups indicating their plans to visit Shanghai during that period. We’ll look at the demand and plan accordingly.”

RBA caught its tour partners by surprise two years ago in April 2008 when it suspended the service to Shanghai, effectively cutting off the Sultanate’s traffic to and from mainland China. The suspension was even more of a surprise due to the fact that tourists from China were fast increasing and were Brunei’s largest market arriving by air.

Wong cited economic consideration for suspending the service two years ago.

“It always boils down to the bottom line, and at that time, we felt that redeploying the planes would generate better economic returns for the company, and thus the decision.”

Asked why RBA was not flying to Beijing, Wong cited the imbalance between inflow and outflow capacity of the city.

“Compared to Shanghai, Beijing has a huge imbalance of inflow and outflow passengers, meaning people fly into Beijing, but travel elsewhere, then fly out from other cities.

“Shanghai is much better in this aspect, probably due to the fact that Beijing has more tourists, whereas Shanghai has more business visitors.”

RBA is now actively engaging agents in China to promote Brunei as a tourist destination.

In January, RBA invited 14 agents from China for them to get a feel of the “Brunei experience”.

They are also inviting members of the Chinese media to visit Brunei in batches, from April to July later this year.

The Chinese travel agents in collaboration with RBA have been actively advertising in the Chinese papers about travel packages to Brunei.

“The idea is for the travel agents to advertise, and not RBA,” Wong said. “Our presence is not that strong yet in China, and it’ll be more effective and beneficial for our travel agents to do the campaigns,” he said.

“We’ll have some generic RBA advertisements on the papers as well. The advertisements are in Chinese of course! We do not plan to give our China customers an English lesson.”

Wong said RBA is also teaming up with The Empire Hotel & Country Club to provide high-end packages to premium tourists from China.

The package will involve staying in the luxurious villas at The Empire, and the tourists will be chauffeured around in the course of their stay in Brunei.

A check with The Empire Hotel revealed that a normal villa will cost about $1,300 per night, and a villa with a shared pool will cost about $2,100 per night. The Brunei Times

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