Malaysian, Indonesian airlines racing to rule Southeast Asia’s low cost carrier market

Malaysian and Indonesian airlines are racing to rule Southeast Asia’s low cost carrier (LCC) market, translating into huge savings on airfares and a flurry of promotional offers for travellers, said Wego.com Chief Flights Officer, Dean Wicks.

The travel search engine is weighing in on a record boom in Asia’s LCC sector as it carries more than 30 individual Asian LCC partnerships options on its metasearch site.

“Malaysia appears to be edging ahead with Air Asia and its six regional carriers that operate under the Air Asia brand, each of which is among the ten largest individual LCCs in the Asia Pacific,” said Wicks in a statement.

“While Lion Air is well known in Indonesia’s domestic market, the carrier, requires a huge investment commitment to grow its brand awareness and gain comparative market share in Air Asia’s well established regions.

“It would be interesting to see who gets the lion share of air space in Asia,” he added.

Wicks observed that airlines are now expanding fast via an affiliate model, and full and partial subsidiary models.

“Air Asia has done this well with its six regional brands and now Lion Air is following the same path,” he said.

On another Malaysian brand, Malindo Air, Wicks reckoned that its newly added strategic service that matched Air Asia’s routes from Kuala Lumpur to Ahmedabad and to Chittagong, would be very popular as Bangladesh has an excess of 150 million people but without a LCC service.

According to Wicks, ten additional LCCs will launch in 2014 and with the planned expansion and additional aircraft by existing players, competition for South East Asian skies is about to become intense.

“All of which is very good news for the tourism and aviation industry in every region, and most of all, exciting times for travellers as airlines battle it out to offer seats,” he said.