NJS halts services to Christmas Island

JAKARTA (JP): The Darwin-based Australian airline National Jet System (NJS) is to terminate all its services to Christmas Island, a small Australian island in the Indian Ocean, next month due to sinking demand.

One of the airline's managers, Debora Avory, told The Jakarta Post yesterday that the last flight to Christmas Island would be on Feb. 17.

The decision means there will be no scheduled flights to the island from Jakarta after that date.

"There are reduced numbers of passengers to the island and we don't want to lose money by keeping the service," Avory said.

She reiterated that a drop in demand had caused in the significant reduction in passenger load on the route.

NJS currently links Jakarta and Christmas Island three times per week and Singapore and Christmas Island twice a week. NJS serves Jakarta-Christmas Island with BAe-146 aircraft.

Sempati Air, a domestic air carrier, stopped its service to Christmas Island several years ago due to low demand. The 137- square-kilometer Christmas Island, is about 3,000 kilometers north of Perth and 500 km south of Jakarta.

Avory said that NJS would continue its Denpasar-Broome and Lombok-Darwin services.

Christmas Island is popular with Indonesians as a resort there owned by businessman Robby Sumampouw offers gambling, a form of entertainment banned in Indonesia.

The resort's popularity has declined in the recent years due to ineffective promotion.

Christmas Island Resort PTY Ltd., the parent company of Christmas Island Resort has appealed to the Supreme Court in Western Australia to appoint any party except Casino Austria International to manage the resort in order to save the property as well as hundreds of its employees.

The two parties were involved in a dispute after the number of visitors dropped just a year after the resort opened in 1993. The parent company blamed the operator for neglecting promotion and maintenance, causing the resort to lose up to US$21.5 million by last November. (icn)