Korean Air expands in China but suspends Fiji service

Korean Air plans to capitalize on recently granted traffic rights into China to launch new routes to three cities later this year but is suspending flights to Fiji. The airline will also launch routes the Philippines later this year and increase frequencies to India’s Delhi and Beijing. The three new China routes will be from the airline’s hub at Seoul’s Incheon International Airport to historic former Chinese capital Nanjing as well as Zhangjiajie and Hangzhou. The airline was granted traffic rights to the city after successful Korea-China aviation talks in March this year. It has yet to reveal start dates but will be flying three times weekly to Hangzhou and Zhangjiajie and four times a week to Nanjing. The new route to the Philippines will be Incheon-Clark and daily services will start from the end of October. READ: Delta ups the ante with major international main cabin revamp. The airline said the Philippines was popular with family travelers and offered a variety of activities such as golf and snorkeling. The Incheon-Delhi operation will move to seven flights a week from September 1 due to increasing demand from both business and leisure travelers. Flights between Incheon and Beijing will increase from 14 to 18 flights a week from the end of October “in order to improve customer benefits”. The airline said the decision to suspend services to Fiji’s Nadi was due to decreasing demand and a "constant deficit of the route”. It said it would change passenger’s reservations in advance to minimize customer convenience. The new routes come after Korean in April launched scheduled flights between Incheon and Boston to give customers more options to travel to the US. It last year entered a joint venture partnership with US-based Delta Air Lines and has expanded its codeshare to connect to 290 cities in the US and 80 n Asia. Korean revealed after winning a recent global customer service award that the partnership had resulted in a 3 percent increase of passengers on American routes compared to the previous year. There had also been an 18 percent increase of passengers transferring at Incheon International Airport arriving from or heading to the US. Celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year, the airline has also been upgrading its fleet with more efficient aircraft such as the Boeing 787-9 and Airbus 220-300. From 2021, it will introduce Korea’s first Boeing 787-10s and has an order for 20 of the aircraft.