Singapore Airlines Opens First Direct Route to China’s Hangzhou

(Yicai) June 8 -- Singapore Airlines has introduced a new direct air route to Hangzhou, China’s eastern Zhejiang province, showing the commitment of the city-state’s flag carrier to the Chinese market.The maiden flight departed from Singapore at 5.40 p.m. on June 1 and landed on time in Hangzhou at 10.50 p.m. The first return flight left at 12.10 a.m. the following day and arrived at 5.10 a.m.Before the launch of SIA’s service, four other airlines were already operating flights on the Singapore-Hangzhou route, Zhou Jie, general manager of Hangzhou Airport, told Yicai. Since the beginning of this year, passenger traffic between the two cities has increased 12 percent to about 85,000, he added.With the addition of the Hangzhou-Singapore route, SIA now operates 112 weekly flights between Singapore and the Chinese mainland, including five daily flights between the city-state and Shanghai, surpassing the pre-pandemic level of 91.“The Chinese outbound travel market is maintaining growth momentum, with demand for cross-border business and leisure trips steadily expanding,” said Dai Haoyu, senior vice president of market planning at SIA. “In the 2025-2026 fiscal year that ended March 31, SIA Group carried over four million passengers between the Chinese mainland and Singapore, up 8.1 percent from the previous fiscal year.”The recovery rate of flights between China and Singapore has reached 115 percent, in comparison with only 59 percent of those between China and Thailand. One of the main reasons behind this was the introduction of a mutual visa exemption policy between China and Singapore in February 2024, which has been driving the continuous growth in passenger volume between the two countries.Chinese mainland visitors to Singapore soared 126 percent to 3.08 million in 2024 from the year before, accounting for 19 percent of the country’s total inbound tourism and allowing China to regain the crown of Singapore’s largest tourism source from Indonesia, according to the Singapore Tourism Board.Twenty to 30 percent of passengers on SIA’s flights to China are transit travelers from Australia and Southeast Asian countries via Singapore, Dai said, adding that through SIA Group’s network, transit passengers can reach 42 destinations across Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific region.On SIA’s inaugural flight to Hangzhou, there were two tour groups from Indonesia and Malaysia. Meanwhile, on the first flight from Hangzhou to Singapore, there was an Indonesian tour group that had flown to Beijing via Singapore and had a trip southward throughout China before returning home from Hangzhou.Editor: Futura Costaglione