India focusSIA and SilkAir combined

India focus

SIA and SilkAir combined fly to a hundred cities in the world, but Asia is the base and clearly the most important market with the largest number of destinations. SilkAir alone has 35 destinations - all in South East Asia upto the subcontinent and China. “We are adding two more in October - in China and Indonesia, so now the total will be 37 destinations. India is unusual because we have parallel operations,” stated Toh. He felt that there are many Tier II and Tier III cities in India that are pushing for air services and Silk Air can service those sectors well and play an important role.

“We are keen to grow our operations between Singapore and India but are constrained by the air services agreement. It even defines by rule how many seats we can operate. E.g. SilkAir started to fly to Hyderabad a few years ago with a small aircraft then we switched to SIA as the city was developing into a major IT hub. With SIA we were operating 777 just four times a week, and as we did not get the rights to go daily, so we switched to Silk Air so that we could fly daily,” he pointed out.

Currently the group's airlines are flying to the maximum that they are allowed to in India. Three more SIA flights a week are being added from Mumbai from end of October.