All Nippon to suspend Indonesia services

All Nippon to suspend Indonesia services

KUALA LUMPUR (AP): Japan's second-biggest airline, All-Nippon Airways Co., will suspend money-losing services to Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi and Denpasar, Indonesia, by the end of March, a senior airline official said Wednesday.

The suspension will restrict ANA flights in the region to Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Thailand, and Mumbai, India.

Tsutomu Ota, ANA's general manager in Kuala Lumpur, said the low passenger levels over the years had forced the airline to take what he called "the tough decision."

"It is something that we couldn't put off any longer," Ota told the Associated Press. "Not many Japanese are flying out to those cities using our routes."

Ota said that Malaysian aviation authorities, who are struggling to turn the new, 9 billion ringgit Kuala Lumpur International Airport into a major hub rivaling Singapore and Bangkok, expressed "disappointment but understand" ANA's move.

Ota said that ANA has been losing money on the Kansai-Kuala Lumpur route since it was introduced in July 1995. He didn't give figures, but said service charges imposed by KLIA were not a factor in the losses.

"We are very happy with the services at KLIA and the charges are much lower than the airports in Japan," Ota said.

ANA flew daily to Kuala Lumpur until March 2000, then scaled down to five days a week.

The carrier is the fourth to pull out from the state-of-the- art Kuala Lumpur airport since it opened in June 1998 at the height of the Asian economic crisis, from which the region has never fully recovered.

Australia's Qantas and Lufthansa of Germany suspended flights to KLIA over the past two years. British Airways has announced it would cease its 50 years of operations in Malaysia by the end of March.

All the airlines cited consolidation and losses for halting their operations in Malaysia.