Singapore Airlines will suspend its only passenger route to Canada before the end of the summer season.
Singapore Airlines (SIA) is to suspend its only passenger route to Canada later this year as the carrier “adjusts capacity in response to demand.”
Flights between Singapore Changi (SIN) and Vancouver (YVR) are slated to end at the beginning of October 2023—a little more than a year after the Star Alliance member launched the nonstop service.
The airline returned to the Canadian market in December 2021 after a 12-year absence by adding a Vancouver stop on its existing Singapore-Seattle route.
Service between Singapore and Vancouver then became nonstop in June 2022. Data provided by OAG Schedules Analyser shows that the 12,807-km (6,915-nm) sector is operated three times per week at the present time using Airbus A350-900 aircraft and is the sole service connecting Singapore and Canada.
SIA’s resumption of operations in Canada two years ago ended an absence of more than a decade without nonstop flights between the two countries. The airline previously operated a 3X-weekly route to Vancouver via Seoul until April 2009.
Alongside the exit from Canada, SIA also confirmed that low-cost subsidiary Scoot is cutting flights to Gold Coast (OOL) in Australia from July. The airline opened the route in July 2017 and operated a regular Boeing 787-9 service until the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. Scoot served close to 130,000 travelers between Singapore and Gold Coast in 2019 alone.
Following a hiatus during the COVID crisis, flights on the 6,207-km route restarted in February 2022 and are currently provided four times per week.
The route rationalization plans came as SIA reported a record operating profit of S$755 million ($564 million) for the third quarter of its financial year, while its LCC subsidiary Scoot saw operating profit increase more than tenfold to S$135 million.
Group capacity is projected to reach an average of around 77% of pre-pandemic levels during the financial year's fourth quarter to the end of March 2023.
During the northern 2023 summer season, SIA said Scoot will expand its services to China with flight resumptions to Haikou, Nanning, Ningbo, Shenyang, and Xi’an, and step-up frequencies to Athens, Langkawi, Manado, and Perth as well as on fifth-freedom routes Taipei-Tokyo Narita and Taipei-Sapporo.
SIA will add supplementary flights to Barcelona, Frankfurt, and Rome during the summer peak, while service to Busan, South Korea, will resume in August.
Earlier this month, it was announced that Scoot plans to add nine new Embraer E190-E2 aircraft to its fleet, complementing its larger Airbus A320-family and Boeing 787 aircraft.
These 112-seat regional jets will enable the LCC to increase its network connectivity by serving thinner routes to non-metro destinations. The first aircraft is scheduled for delivery in 2024, and the remaining eight are to be progressively introduced by the end of 2025.