By Jenne Lajiun
China Southern Airlines begins Shenzhen-KK flight
KOTA KINABALU: China Southern Airlines started its flight connecting Shenzhen to Kota Kinabalu at 1.40am today (Sept 29).
According to Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Christina Liew, the airline, which is Asia’s largest and the world’s fourth largest, will fly on all days except Wednesdays.
“With this additional connectivity, there will now be a total of 98 weekly flights direct from a total of 10 major and secondary cities in China to Kota Kinabalu International Airport (KKIA),” she said during a press conference at her office yesterday.
She added that the flight would be the airlines’ second connection to Kota Kinabalu after successfully connecting KKIA to Guangzhou and also Sabah’s second connection to Shenzhen.
She said that in less than three years, China Southern Airlines had increased its flights from three to 21 weekly from China to Kota Kinabalu, which is almost one-fifth of the total flights from China to Kota Kinabalu.
She said this signified strong confidence in the destination.
Christina also congratulated the airline for upgrading its aircraft from A320 to A321 for the first five flights due to highly encouraging response during the opening sales of the route in mid-August and reaching over 90 percent of the A320’s capacity.
“The decision to increase the seat capacity with a bigger aircraft would bring additional 200 passengers in the first five flights,” she said, adding that as of July this year, the total arrivals to Sabah had increased by 5.3 percent or 2.221 million compared to the same period last year.
She said 43.3 percent or at least 358,000 of these arrivals were from China, making the country the largest market source for arrivals to Sabah.
“We hope to achieve 500,000 China arrivals by the end of the year,” Christina said.
China Southern Airlines (Malaysia) general manager Eric Wang said they would study and conduct a marketing research on Sandakan and Tawau as destinations and make a proposal to the airlines’ headquarters.
Also present was the People’s Republic of China in Kota Kinabalu Consul General Liang Caide.