Thai Airways will halve flight frequency to both London Heathrow and Frankfurt from this summer.
Fierce competition has already obliged the loss-making Thai flag-carrier to slim down its Paris service.
And now it has decided to make the same changes to both London and Frankfurt. Thai currently serves these latter two cities twice daily, but the coming months will see flight frequency cut to a single daily service.
Thai's daily Paris Charles de Gaulle flight is operated by an A380 and the London route will gain the superjumbo from July (see news, February 5).
And Frankfurt, currently served by an A380 and an A340-600, will be downgraded to single daily A380 service starting in the spring.
The A380, which will be used for Bangkok-London is being transferred from Thai's Bangkok-Osaka route, presumably because business there has not been as satisfactory as originally expected.
In fact, with hindsight Thai probably wishes it had cancelled its order for six A380s some years ago. (Its superjumbos were ordered from Airbus many years ago, before the Gulf carriers became a competitive threat).
In an interview in the Bangkok Post in 2009, the then Thai chairman Wallop Bhukkanasut said that the A380 "is not economically viable to have and deploy on our network. It is a special mission airplane".
The competition faced by Thai comes mainly from the Gulf carriers that have poured huge capacity into the market.
Both Emirates and Qatar Airways operate A380s between the Gulf and the Thai capital. And doubtless Etihad, which has just acquired the A380, will follow suit in due course as Abu Dhabi-Bangkok is its busiest route with almost 750,000 passengers annually.
Emirates alone operates as many as five flights a day into Bangkok with three operated by A380s.
It is true that passengers flying from Europe with the Gulf carriers must switch planes en route, whereas Thai flies non-stop.
But, as we have said many times before, the Gulf airliness serve many points the length and breadth of Europe. Therefore, their schedules are just as, if not more, convenient.
Thai's single daily service represents a reduction in capacity and is the first time in decades of service to Europe since the 1970s that it has cut back in this way.
It is unclear what Thai will do with the soon-to-be vacant slots at Heathrow. Will it sell them (Scandinavia's SAS recently acquired US$60 million for a single Heathrow slot-pair) or lease them out?
Alex McWhirter
