Airlines boost seats for holidaymakers

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)