SIA expects up to 8% growth in Indonesia

Debbie A. Lubis, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Singapore Airlines expects the number of its passengers flying to and from Indonesia to grow between five and eight percent this year on the condition that Indonesia's economy improved, and that travelers regained confidence in the airline industry.

"We are hopeful that things are improving and people return to travel. But of course, it depends on the economic situation of the country," Raja Segran, general manager of Singapore Airlines in Indonesia told The Jakarta Post.

He was speaking at the launching of the TravelSmart-Asia campaign by Abacus International. The campaign is aimed at reviving the public's confidence in the safety of air travel.

Although flying is by far the safest form of modern transport, public confidence in air travel was severely hurt following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

Following the attacks, Singapore Airlines cut its flights on the Denpasar-Singapore route to 24 flights a week, down from 28 flights a week, while the Surabaya-Singapore service was reduced to seven flights a week from 12 flights.

Segran said that the airline would return the number of flights on the Singapore-Denpasar route back to 28 a week within the next few weeks.

"But we have no intention of increasing the capacity (in the Surabaya route) in the immediate future because we do not see the traffic coming back yet," Segran said.

The airline had no intention of adding flights to the Jakarta- Singapore route, on which the company also cut flights, down to seven from eight in July of last year.

Nevertheless, as part of a bid to improve service on the Jakarta-Singapore route, airline officials said that they would upgrade their planes on that route by the end of the month.

"We will remove and replace the Airbus 310s with bigger aircraft like Airbus 340s and 747s for the Jakarta-Singapore route," Segran said.

Today, people prefer traveling short-haul rather than long- haul flights, he said, adding that Asian flights to Europe and the U.S. remained weak, while regional flights in Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand were strong.

Abacus International's president and chief executive officer (CEO) Don Birch agreed that the Sept. 11 attacks had heavily impacted public confidence in air travel.

But he added that he believed the public would regain its confidence in flying if they were provided with comprehensive information on air travel.

Providing such information was the main objective of the TravelSmart Asia campaign, he said.