Spring Airlines may cut Japan

Spring Airlines (SA), a Shanghai-based budget carrier, confirmed to the Global Times on Monday that the company is considering a suspension of its loss-making China-Japan flights due to the two countries' disputes over the Diaoyu Islands.

A final decision about the suspension has yet to be made, but the seat occupancy rate for all flights between China and Japan is less than 50 percent, causing serious losses to the company, said SA spokesperson Zhang Wu'an.

Starting from September 2012, 12 scheduled flights per week on the company's three air routes to Japan have been performing poorly amid the impact of the Diaoyu Islands disputes, Zhang told the Global Times on Monday.

The prices of tickets from Shanghai to Japan's Ibaraki were reduced after the disputes occurred to range from 299 yuan ($48) to 399 yuan, compared to the previous high of more than 1,000 yuan, he said.

Small domestic airlines like SA don't have enough capacity to cope with China's sudden (but not surprising) and slow-to-disappear anti-Japan sentiment, Li Lei, an industry analyst from China Securities Co, told the Global Times on Monday.

Li said that there are still consumers who must make business trips to Japan, but they tend to prefer big domestic airlines.

"Even though I want to go to Japan, I would rather buy discounted tickets from big airlines, since SA is too small and its flights to Japan land in remote Japanese cities like Ibaraki, which is very inconvenient for visitors," a Beijing resident surnamed Liu, who visited Japan in July 2012, told the Global Times on Monday.

SA mainly runs a tourism charter business, which has caused rapidly shrinking revenues and should force them to close all Japanese flights as soon as possible, given that many domestic travel companies canceled their tour groups between China and Japan as early as September and October, said Li.

China Comfort Travel Group Co, once one of the country's largest travel agencies for group tours to Japan, told the Global Times on Monday that they still offer no tours to Japan.

The number of Chinese tourists to Japan in 2012 dropped by 24 percent year-on-year, Xinhua reported on January 11, citing data from the Japan National Tourism Organization. By contrast, outbound Chinese travelers to Thailand grew 27 percent over the same period.

Meanwhile, the numbers of Japanese tourists who booked visits to China for February and March 2013 have also fallen by as much as 80.3 percent and 77.2 percent respectively year-on-year due to the Diaoyu Islands disputes, according to domestic news portal huanqiu.com on Monday, citing data from the Japan Association of Travel Agents.

Japan's cold attitude toward China tourism had blocked SA's further expansion into the Japanese market, which was expected to be their largest overseas hub, Zhang noted.