Aero Taiwan is the little republic's newest with bold ambitions to become the leading national carrier. The carrier commenced operations last week with 4 embraer E195s in a two class configuration. They are configured with 100 Economy and 8 Businessclass seats.
Currently 8 destinations are served from the country's capital Taipei including 4 domestic (Kaoshiung, Makung, Tainan & Taitung), 1 Japanese (Tokyo) and 2 across the strait in China (Shenzhen & Guangzhou). We aim to be the main carrier on Cross Strait flights after our initial flights have been very successful. We decided to avoid the over crowded TPE-HKG market initially serve destinations such as Shenzhen & Guangzhou which are in close proximity to HKG (So easy to journey to HKG) as well as having their own local market.
Looking at the Chart above, you can see that currently China is just 18% of the market we serve, with Domestic being the majority with 76% of our seats per week. We aim to significantly increase both our China and Japanese Market to represent a significant portion of our operation.
We intially aim to keep to a conservative approach whilst we get a foothold in our markets by serving unserved/underserved routes, specifically focusing on China/Japan as well increasing our domestic operation. South East China will be our main focus. We are extremely optimistic that this plan can be successful thanks to our strong ties/link ups with two of east asia's bggest airlines ChinaOne & New Century Star Airlines who collectively offer around 6 million seats per week.
We wanted vibrant colours as our branding to stick out when parked at airports, this is what was produced. The blue and red perfectly balance each other out and provide a distinctive image to our customers.
In an effort to be more flexible in the demand of our routes, Aero Taiwan recently agreed to acquire an Embraer E175 aircraft. The aircraft share commonality with our current fleet of E195s - therefore reducing costs. They offer smaller capacity (64 Y & 8 C class seats) so enables us to slightly adjust capacity for some Domestic routes as well as add two new domestic routes to Chiayi & Taichung and our 3rd route to China - Xiamen. The short hop over the strait is underserved in our eyes so we felt the demand needed to be served. Also our flagship route to Kaoshiung has seen it's services increase from 4 to 5xDaily.
We now have 308 weekly services to/from TPE with plans to continue the expansion whilst keeping profitable.
This week, Aero Taiwan has added a new, larger aircraft type to it's fleet in the form of a MD83 aircraft. The aircraft offers a 75% seat increase per flight over the E195, allowing a significant increas on our trunk routes to Shenzhen & Tokyo. Two of the 3 Daily TPE-SZN services are now operated by the M83. This freeing of E195 capacity has enabled to double our Chinese destinations from 3 to 6 with addition of Fuzhou, Hangzhou & Nanchang to our network. These destinations fit in line with our plan to be the carrier of choice between Taiwan & South East China.
The twice daily Fuzhou & Daily Hangzhou/Nanchang services increases our daily cross strait offering from 7 to 11 Daily flights providing even more destination opportunities thanks to our close co-operation with China One.
Whilst we continue to take a slow pace of expansion, we are ensuring that we remain profitable throughout the whole operation. We are able to start services straight away with good loads thanks to our close Interlining with our handful of partners, and connection waves through the day providing seamless connections for our Guests.
As the image shows, there has been a significant shift in which markets our seats are deployed with the China market now attributing for over 1/3rd of the seats we have on offer. This has caused a significant reduction in % of seats deployed domestically (Though there has been no decrease in number of seats offered) due to expansion of the chinese market.
[/url]