Firefly has announced that it has reinstated its routes from the Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport in Subang to the Seletar Airport in Singapore. The low-cost arm of the Malaysian Aviation Group resumed the flights once more on 13 June, two years after it was suspended due to the pandemic.
The Subang-Seletar route uses ATR 72-500 turboprop aircraft with a capacity for 72 passengers. The airline said that it currently operates twice-daily return flights but has plans to progressively increase the number of trips by the end of the year.
One-way tickets start from RM119 and can be purchased through Firefly’s mobile app and website, which come with complimentary 20kg baggage allowance and in-flight refreshments. The airline’s chief executive officer Philip See hopes that demand will return to pre-pandemic levels and expects to reach 60,000 to 70,000 passengers by the end of the year.
As for flights between Seletar and Penang, See said that Firefly has no plans for such a service because its planes do not have the range to fly the route, but it did recently resume its jet airliner flights connecting Penang to Johor Bahru, Kuching, and Kota Kinabalu. He also revealed that Firefly won’t be reinstating other international routers within the next 12 months or expand to new destinations.
With Malaysia reopening its borders to international travellers in April, the country has set a target of two million tourists for 2022. Just in the last two months, over one million visitors have already flooded the nation, with 600,000 of them coming from Singapore. To ferry passengers between the two countries across the land border, cross-border busses and taxi services resumed operations in May while the KTM Tebrau Shuttle is set to be reinstated this weekend.
Other local airlines have similarly started reinstating suspended international routes to meet the increased appetite for travel. Malaysia Airlines resumed its flight to Australia and has plans for London flights in June; AirAsia now has flights to several states in India; AirAsia X resumed flights to Sydney, Incheon, and New Delhi; and Batik Air resumed direct flights to Bali.
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