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BA launches Tokyo Haneda flights

25 Feb 2011 by BusinessTraveller

British Airways has launched its new service to Tokyo’s “close-in” airport, Haneda.

The inaugural flight took place on February 19 and Business Traveller was on board – for a review, click HERE.

The new service follows the reopening of the airport to long-haul traffic in October. Originally the city’s international airport, it became a primarily domestic facility when the far-out Narita opened in 1978.

BA is the first European airline to provide a direct link to Haneda (Air France codeshares on JAL’s daily service into Paris Charles de Gaulle). It is operating five-times-weekly flights (departing London Heathrow daily except for Tuesdays and Wednesdays) using a four-class B777.

As previously reported by Business Traveller (see In Focus), stringent slot constraints set by the Japanese authorities, coupled with curfew restrictions at Heathrow, have made for early arrival and departure times.

Flights leave Heathrow at 0805 and arrive at Haneda at 0455 the following day, departing from Haneda at 0625 and landing back into London at 1000 the same day. From March 27, flights will depart and arrive into Heathrow about an hour earlier.

Richard Tams, BA’s head of UK and Ireland sales, told Business Traveller: “The timings are clearly down to slot constraints. I don’t think they’re far off being right – intuitively, to delay the service by an hour out there and an hour back would probably be about right. We’ll certainly be pushing to get the best timings we can, because we’re investing a lot in the service. The priority was to get the service up and running.”

As to whether the airline might increase flight frequency in future, Tams said: “It’s a build-up of the service. We’ve tried to hone in on the peak days. If demand and slots allow, we’ll take it up to daily as soon as possible.”

BA’s existing daily service to Narita remains unchanged. Tams said: “I think we can sustain the two routes quite nicely. In 2008 we reduced our Narita services to one a day, but we’ve now seen the traffic build up so it was opportune to look at our Tokyo capacity again. It seemed right to serve both airports – it allows us to start adding capacity back in but offer our passengers the choice.”

Haneda should prove popular with business travellers as it is only about 20km from the city centre, compared with about 70km for Narita. Tams said: “The difference between Haneda and Narita for getting into town is considerable. For business travellers, for whom every hour is vital, the ability to come in early in the morning and get into the financial area in half an hour is very important.”

It also offers good domestic connections – BA’s Oneworld partner, JAL, operates 185 departures a day to 33 points in Japan. Tams said: We have an ally in JAL – they’ve been very helpful in getting us into Haneda and supporting us. Their flight connections have helped to make the service commercially viable. Feeding into JAL’s big domestic hub is very important to us.”

He added that he saw Haneda “turning into more of a Oneworld hub than before”. Fellow alliance member American Airlines inaugurated its own daily service to New York on the same day as BA, while JAL serves a total of ten international destinations from the airport, and Cathay Pacific flies there from Hong Kong.

The airline says return fares will start from £625 in economy, £1,273 in premium economy, £3,045 in business and £5,761 in first. It would not be charging more for Haneda, Tams said. “The fares for both airports will be standard, in the same way that we common-rate New York JFK and Newark on the tariff. They will be interchangeable – people will be able to ‘open-jaw’ between flying into one and flying out of the other. We believe people will use both services because of timing and travel plans.”

He added: “With all our flights, we can control the fare levels by the way we manage them. If Haneda becomes very popular then, clearly, the availability of some of the cheaper fares will be restricted. But we expect the two to perform pretty similarly.”

Tams said forward bookings were “very encouraging”. “Because the service is going to rely a lot on business travel, the booking lead-in time is much slimmer so you can’t always get a very close view from a long way out, but so far so good. The upturn in business travel again, and the service linking two big financial centres, means we remain very optimistic.”

Visit ba.com for further information.

Report by Michelle Mannion

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