Singapore’s low-cost airline Scoot will be suspending its flights to four cities in Asia “due to a combination of weak demand and a shortage of aircraft resources”, it announced on Monday (29 April).
The cities that the airline mentioned are Lucknow in the north of India; Kalibo, the main airport to the popular Philippine island Boracay; Quanzhou in China’s Fujian province and Male, the capital of Maldives. All these affected cities are served by the airline’s Airbus A320 aircraft.
It said that Scoot is experiencing aircraft shortage as it won’t be able to receive SilkAir’s Boeing 737-800NG aircraft for the financial year of 2019/2020 after the grounding of SilkAir’s Boeing 737 MAX 8 fleet.
The announcement also revealed that the last flights departing Singapore to Lucknow and Kalibo end in June, Quanzhou ends in August and Male stops in October.
However, it will operate additional flights to Lucknow in June and to Kalibo for selected periods until the suspension of service, it said.
Currently, Scoot operates three flights a week to Lucknow, Kalibo and Quanzhou, while it travels four times weekly to Male.
Following the news of the suspension, the airline said that it had contacted customers with existing booking to explain their options.
Affected customers can choose to either rebook their flight to the same destination departing before the planned suspension date or to a different destination within the same county, at no additional charges.
But, if customers opt to rebook to a different destination, it must be done within seven days of the original departure date.
If they don’t wish to pick any of these options, then they can obtain a 100 per cent refund on their booking via their original mode of payment or a 120 percent refund via a Scoot Travel Voucher.
Despite the suspension of the flights, the airline said that it will still continue to undertake the routes SilkAir had earlier committed to transfer over.
These routes are:
- Luang Prabang and Vientiane in Laos, in April 2019
- Coimbatore, Trivandrum and Visakhapatnam in India, between May 2019 and October 2019
- Changsha, Fuzhou, Kunming and Wuhan in China, between May 2019 and June 2019
- Chiang Mai in Thailand, in October 2019
- Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia, in December 2019
- Balikpapan, Lombok, Makassar, Manado, Semarang and Yogyakarta in Indonesia, between May 2020 and July 2020
