Singapore Airlines announced it is doubling down flights to the U.S. The carrier resumed daily Newark-Singapore service on March 28, an approx. 18-hour flight that is now the world’s second-longest route and increased the capacity of its daily JFK-Frankfurt-Singapore route by substituting a jumbo Airbus A380 jet for the Boeing 777-300ER aircraft it was using, according to a report in TravelWeekly.com.
With the addition of Newark, Singapore is now flying 90 per cent of the U.S. frequencies that it offered in 2019, even as the carrier’s systemwide passenger capacity is just 57 per cent of its pre-pandemic level.
And with the airline planning to increase frequencies on its nonstop service to San Francisco by June, while also splitting its Seattle-Vancouver-Singapore route into distinct nonstops from those Pacific Coast cities, it expects to be flying 62 weekly North American frequencies as summer begins, including 59 from the U.S. That’s up from the 57 weekly North American frequencies that Singapore was flying before the pandemic began.
In addition, the airline has already returned to all seven of the U.S. airports it was operating in pre-Covid. Those figures represent a steep climb from the three weekly U.S. frequencies that Singapore operated between April and October of 2020, all to Los Angeles.
The build-up has been buoyed by the relatively permissive entry posture the U.S. took toward Singapore travelers throughout the pandemic, said Joey Seow, the airline’s vice president for the Americas region.
“Europe was only open last November. Asia is only progressively opening. So, our step-up of our Asian service has been slower than our service to the U.S. as well as to Europe,” he said.
As Singapore, routinely ranked as one of the best airlines in the world for its onboard product and service, ramps up in the New York market in particular, it also brought its most luxurious cabin product with the Airbus A380 to the U.S.
The Airbus A380s the carrier is now using to operate JFK-Frankfurt-Singapore feature six ultra-spacious first-class suites, each of which offer separate recliner seats and beds as well as a sliding door for privacy. Tickets generally cost between $8,000 and $12,000 one-way.
Pre-pandemic, Seow said, business travelers outnumbered leisure flyers on Singapore’s U.S. flights. Currently, though, the leisure market is substantially larger than the corporate market. Nevertheless, the response to the new first-class suites has been “tremendous,” he said.
More generally, Seow said that JFK-Frankfurt-Singapore has benefited from the reopening of Europe, while Singapore’s entire U.S. network is getting a boost as more Asian countries open their borders.
“Not all Asian carriers are back into the market currently,” he said. “And because we have been operating through the pandemic, we have been able to sustain the route, with a lot of passengers going to Singapore and beyond.”
