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Angel opens new era of travel to Northern Thailand
Bangkok Post November 30, 1998
Imtiaz Muqbil
Kunming, China: Thailand's second designated carrier, Angel Airlines, is set to open a new chapter in aviation with the Greater Mekong Subregion with the planned launch of flights into six Indochina destinations from its base in Chiang Rai. The move will provide a major impetus to tourism throughout North Thailand and the Indochina region. It will help offset the overwhelming dependence on South Thailand's beaches as a source of tourism income and help tour operators substantially broaden their choice of holiday spots in some of the most exotic parts of Asia. Angel Airlines' consultant Niels Lumholdt, managing director of Bangkok-based Aviation and Tourism International (ATI), unveiled the airline's plans last week at the Mekong Tourism Forum organised here last week by the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA). He said the airline has applied for traffic rights to use its two Boeing 737s and one Dornier aircraft to open up flights from Chiang Rai to Mandalay, Kunming, Jinghong, Chengdu, Luang Prabang and Siem Reap. If permission comes through, the entire network could be in place by the first quarter of 1999. This will link northern Thailand with some of Asia's most culturally attractive cities. Clearly excited by the huge potential, Tourism Authority of Thailand officials have promised extensive promotional support at international trade shows and through all their marketing and advertising efforts. Tourism officials of China and Myanmar are offering conditional support, saying that travel agents to be taken on familiarisation trips will get easy access to visas while travel journalists invited to write about the opportunities will have to undergo the usual long processing wait. Traffic feed to Chiang Rai will be organised via links with Singapore and Bangkok on Angel flights as well as interline links with the 70 foreign airlines flying into Thailand. Angel has one 106-seat Boeing 737-300 leased from Malaysian Airline and expects to get another Boeing 737-500 at the end of December 1998. Luzi Matzig, group managing director of Diethelm Travel, noted that the flights will open up huge opportunities for creative packaging of holidays. However, George Grenville, corporate development director of Abercrombie and Kent, said the region faces a major challenge in first making itself known as a tourism destination. Mr Lumholdt pointed out North Thailand was one of the 'neglected areas' of Thai tourism but has the greatest potential for attracting a high level of cultural tourism. He urged that once the flights are approved, the region's hotels, tour operators and national tourism organisations should pool resources and undertake a major marketing effort. He promised fares would be competitive with regional airlines operating in other parts of Asia. He also sought to alleviate tour operators' concerns about Angel's technical reliability, punctuality and service standards. Angel has full traffic rights from the Thai side to operate the flights to the new destinations but needs approval from the aviation authorities of Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and China. However, no problems are expected as no other airline is currently serving these routes. All the target airports have the necessary customs, immigration and quarantine facilities to process international passengers. The move will give a major boost to Chiang Rai which has long been designated one of Thailand's 'international' airports and provided with infrastructure facilities to match, but with no-one expressing any interest in using it for anything more than the occasional charter. Mr Lumholdt noted the disparity between Chiang Mai, the closest competing destination, which gets up to 11 flights daily by THAI Airways International, and Chiang Rai, which gets a mere three. "I'm more convinced than ever that the niche for a new airline into the Mekong Subregion as well as for existing airlines like Yunnan Airlines is to try to facilitate movement of tourists into secondary destinations as other means of transport are too difficult," Mr Lumholdt said. "Angel Airlines has exactly the same terms of reference as THAI, and can fly anywhere that THAI flies domestically or internationally, but when considering the current economic crisis and the circumstances of starting a new airline in 1998, it becomes even more important to do something that will support all the parts of the industry to make ends meet. "The location of Chiang Rai is ideal as a secondary Thai hub. Chiang Rai has got an international airport which is only being used for charters. Thus, we can use something that is already there while enhancing the revenue for those who have invested in it." The new flights will allow a slow but steady increase in capacity to those relatively new destinations, especially in view of warnings from culture-watchers like Joe Cummings, author of the lonely Planet guidebooks for backpackers, that "too much accessibility (of these relatively pristine new destinations) can be as much of a problem as too little." Mr Lumholds said there were just enough hotel capacity in these new destinations to accommodate a fresh influx of tourists. The Angel flights will start the gradual process of overcoming what is generally considered to be one of major roadblocks to developing Mekong tourism: Aviation accessibility. Mr Matzig said a survey of Diethelm's office managers in each of the major Mekong tourism cities had resulted in at least three of them citing air-access as one of the problems. There is enough airline capacity between the main cities of the Mekong region. For example, THAI and its competitors have 44 flights a week from Bangkok to Phnom Penh, 29 to Rangoon, 21 to Siem Reap, 20 to Ho Chi Minh City, 14 to Vientiane, 13 to Hanoi and 12 to Kunming. However, it is the secondary cities that need the access, especially from emerging airlines like Angel. If the flights take-off, it will also show clearly to regional aviation policy-makers that while other airlines elsewhere in Asia are croaking under the impact of the economic crisis, the continuing boom in tourism to Thailand can open up opportunities for Thai airlines to succeed and generate even more foreign exchange for the national treasury.
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