Singapore Airlines to lease 15 new A330's

[Nigelinoz]

UPDATE 1-Singapore Airlines to lease 15 new Airbus A330-300s | Reuters

Singapore Airlines (SIA) said it had reached an agreement with Airbus to lease 15 more A330-300 aircraft.
SIA, 55 percent owned by Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings , said in a statement on Wednesday that the aircraft will be delivered from the world's largest plane maker between 2013 and 2015 and will use engines from Rolls-Royce .
The carrier said the planes will provide additional growth opportunities, signalling optimism in the outlook for air travel over the next few years at a time when Asia has overtaken North America as the busiest travel market.
"They will be operated by Singapore Airlines on routes within Asia as well as to points in Australia and the Middle East," SIA said.

Interesting in the light of the codeshare with VA since SQ have said that the new aircraft "will be operated by Singapore Airlines on routes within Asia as well as to points in Australia and the Middle East"

Cheers
N'oz

 

[Nigelinoz]

And today we have this report:-
Singapore Airlines likely to focus on specifically targeted growth | Aspire Aviation

First of all, the still unnamed low-cost carrier is very likely to forge partnership with Virgin Australia, Australia’s second-largest carrier renamed from Virgin Blue, in a fashion in which the partnership between Singapore Airlines (SIA) and Virgin Australia was made and potentially operate the Singapore-Brisbane route, which is one of the early candidates earmarked for SIA’s low-cost off-shoot, Aspire Aviation has learned. This would enable passengers on SIA’s LCC to continue their travel on Virgin Australia’s flights to multiple Australian cities and vice versa, thereby partly solving the feeding problem at SIA’s low-cost off-shoot and virtually creating a seamless flight network for these two partners.
Moreover, instead of adopting the plain no-frill low-cost business model, Aspire Aviation has learned that SIA’s LCC is likely to adopt a differentiated product offering or a hybrid business model similar to the one adopted by Virgin Australia, which aims to capture 20% of Australia’s lucrative domestic business travel market under a plan spearheaded by its chief executive John Borghetti.

Interesting times ahead for aviation in Australia and Asia.
Cheers
N'oz

 

[Justchecking]

Very interesting since DJ were rumoured to be getting a similar number of these aircraft but no fim order has yet been announced. But I thought in the DJ,SQ tie up announcement that Borghetti specfically said ther agreement ruled out use of SQs LCC arm.

 

[Nigelinoz]

In his speech to the press club last week Alan Joyce made a comment about SQ's low cost carrier idea being a compliment to QF
in the way that they set up Jetstar (Well I'm paraphrasing his comments)seems to me that if this report is correct and the new
SQ low cost carrier does start operating on SIN-BNE (I'm guessing that it would need Australian regulatory approval) with feed ins to
the VA domestic network then it would seem that Mr Joyce was correct,the only difference between the QF/DJ model and the VA/SQ model
would be that VA can't (yet)(and maybe never)be classed as a premium carrier in the way that QF is (or at least used to be,depending on your view)
Cheers
N'oz

 

[dk4]

I wonder if, as part of all the back room dealing over the Virgin trademark & international usage rights, SQ ended up with the Asian rights to the name? e.g. Virgin Singapore, or even Virgin Asia?