Eight Low Cost Airlines in Asia Pacific Form Alliance

Eight low cost airlines – Cebu Pacific (including subsidiary Cebgo), Jeju Air, Nok Air, NokScoot, Scoot, Tigerair Singapore, Tigerair Australia and Vanilla Air – have formed an alliance.

Value Alliance, as it is called, will enable travellers to view, select and book the best-available airfares on flights from any of the airlines in a single transaction, directly from each partner website, thanks to technology developed by Air Black Box (ABB).

Unlike typical interline technologies, ABB also allows travellers to book the full suite of ancillary choices they have come to appreciate from LCCs, such as seat and meal selection, variable baggage allowances and other inflight features – across all partner airline sectors in a single itinerary.

Value Alliance, which serves more than 160 destinations and has a collective fleet of 176 aircraft across the Asia Pacific region, will allow the partner airlines to more effectively compete against popular low cost giants such as Lion and AirAsia.

Katsuya Goto, President of Vanilla Air, said, “The technology enables us to interface with other airlines within Value Alliance, including those using different passenger service systems (PSS), to provide a solution to a guest’s travel query – even on routes Vanilla Air may not itself serve to connect Japan to the rest of Asia Pacific.”

Scoot, Nok Air and NokScoot are already offering each other’s flights and fares powered by the new ABB technology and other alliance members will follow in the coming months.

ABB’s Air Connection Engine (ACE) platform has filed for NDC Certification with IATA and is expected to complete full certification soon.

Asia Pacific Tourism

Destinations across Asia Pacific welcomed 570 million foreign arrivals in 2015, a new record for international arrivals into the region.

The beautiful country of Myanmar led the way, with an impressive increase of almost 52% followed by Japan with just over 47% year-on-year (read more).

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