Philippine Airlines spreads wings in Australia
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Philippine Airlines (PAL) has expanded its operations in Australia, with the launch of new flights to Perth, Darwin and Brisbane.
The Manila-based national carrier’s first service to Perth arrived on Monday morning (3 June 2013), marking the start of a new scheduled service operating four times a week. This came a day after PAL’s inaugural services to Darwin and Brisbane, with flights to the Northern Territory capital now operating daily and services to the Queensland hub running three times a week.
The new Australian connections add to PAL’s existing services to Sydney and Melbourne, and take the airline’s total Australian capacity to 7,400 weekly seats to five Australian cities. This makes it the largest carrier between the Philippines and Australia.
PAL’s President, Ramon Ang, said the new routes would be attractive not only for Filipinos, but for other Asian travellers.
“The new connections are envisioned to increase passenger traffic between the Philippines and Australia and strengthen bilateral ties between both countries. Return flights from these cities make Manila an ideal gateway to popular Asian destinations like Hong Kong, China, Japan and Korea and a jump off point to the country`s top travel spots,” he said.
PAL will serve the Manila-Darwin route daily, with three of the weekly services continuing on to Brisbane and four continuing to Perth. All flights will be operated using a single-aisle, 156-seat Airbus A320 aircraft.
The new flights mark the latest stage in PAL’s recent expansion. Last month the carrier launched flights to Kuala Lumpur, and will start flying to Guangzhou next month. Then on 1 October 2013, the carrier will return to the Middle East with the launch of daily flights to Abu Dhabi, with flights to Doha, Riyadh, Dammam, Jeddah and Dubai following before the end of the year.
