Asia Low-Cost Carrier Alliance Needs to Prove Its Benefits or ‘Die’
Photo Credit: The U-FLY alliance has five airline members in China, Hong Kong and South Korea. The livery is now on two aircraft, one on West Air and the one pictured is on an HK Express plane. U-FLY
Skift Take
Making history as the world’s first low-cost carrier alliance is one thing. Will history judge the U-FLY alliance, comprising five LCCs in North Asia, as a game-changer that’s able to get fiercely independent players to work together?
Editor's Note: Skift launched a new series, Gateway, to broaden our news coverage geographically with first-hand, original stories from correspondents embedded in cities around the world.
We are featuring regular reports several times per week from Beijing, Singapore and Cape Town, and look for us to add other cities soon. Gateway Singapore, for example, signifies that the reporter is writing from that city although her coverage of the business of travel will meander to other locales in the region. Read about the series here, and check out all the stories in the series here.
With a lot of small low-cost carriers in Asia hitting a brick wall in expansion, the U-FLY alliance believes it has the potential to break out of its North Asian roots into Southeast Asia and South Asia, and even beyond the region in attracting longhaul low cost carriers keen for connectivity to Asia.
But that’s like a baby jumping before it can walk. First it has to prove that independent LCCs, which
