Airlines boost seats for holidaymakers

JAKARTA (JP): Several national airlines are boosting their seat capacity to accommodate people returning to Jakarta from December holidays.

At least two airlines -- flag carrier PT Garuda Indonesia and privately-owned PT Awair International -- confirmed they had boosted their capacity to return holidaymakers to Jakarta.

Garuda's spokesman Pujobroto said the state-owned airlines increased its passenger seats by 5,079 to 29,012 from Jan. 1 to Jan. 8.

The company had earlier prepared 23,933 additional seats to transport the holidaymakers from late December, 2000 to early January, 2001, but, he said, the additional seats turned out to be not enough and decided to add another 5,079 seats.

A sharp increase in the number of passengers was evident on some of Garuda's main routes, especially to Jakarta from Denpasar, Yogyakarta, Batam, Medan, and Singapore, he said in a statement.

Pujobroto also said Garuda had increased its flight frequency and were operating bigger aircraft on some of the routes.

For instance, it was using the 247-seat DC-10 aircraft instead of the 124-seat Boeing 737-400 on the Jakarta-Singapore route.

According to the government, some 18 million people were expected to travel during the recently ended Christmas and Idul Fitri holidays, with approximately 382,000 people using airplanes.

Awair spokesperson Arifin Hutabarat said that the airline had increased its seat capacity to 252 seats from 175 seats on its Airbus A310-300 aircraft on the Jakarta-Medan route.

Round-trip flights on the route had also been increased to twice a day, compared to once a day, Arifin said. (tnt)