canton route vs kangaroo route

China Southern takes on kangaroo routes with Canton routes to London, Paris and Amsterdam

January 16, 2012 – 2:05 pm, by Ben Sandilands






Move over Emirates, it seems China Southern is not only keen to sponsor high profile Australian events, but is turning its plans to make Guangzhou a hub for through flights to Europe a reality, soon!

This is what the airline said last night:


China Southern Airlines has introduced the Canton Route to Europe, capitalising on new scheduled services from its Guangzhou hub to London Heathrow in June.

Announcing the new three flights a week schedule in Sydney, China Southern Executive Vice President He Zongkai said he hoped the Canton Route would become as popular as the Kangaroo Route for Australians travelling to London and Europe.

“This June we will launch a new Guangzhou-London air service and increase flight frequencies on our Guangzhou-Paris and Guangzhou-Amsterdam services to make Guangzhou an ideal transfer hub between Australia and Europe,” he said.

“I would like to call this air link the Canton Route.”

Mr He is leading a high-powered China Southern delegation for the 2012 Sydney Festival, which China Southern has joined as a leading sponsor and official airline. He is to be joined later in the Festival by China Southern’s President and CEO, Mr Tan Wangeng.

He told thousands of Sydneysiders attending the popular Summer Sounds in the Domain concert on Saturday night that China Southern saw its support for the Sydney Festival as an important way to strengthen relations with NSW and the rest of Australia.

“Since last year, China Southern Airlines has operated double daily flights between Sydney and Guangzhou,” Mr He said.

“We have increased the frequency of our Melbourne-Guangzhou service to double daily, extended our Brisbane-Guangzhou route to Beijing, and launched a new Perth–Guangzhou-Beijing service with three weekly flights.

“China Southern presently operates 35 weekly flights from Australia to Guangzhou … and we expect that by the end of 2015 we will operate more than 110 weekly round-trip flights from Australia.”
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These plans would eclipse the current size of the Emirates network to Australia in three years.

At a time when Qantas sees the way forward as handing more of its London and Europe passengers over British Airways, something much more likely to inspire them to ditch it altogether and fly on a single brand like Singapore Airlines or Emirates all the way, China Southern is following the same playbook.

Doubts continue to circulate in the industry over fate of the Qantas service to Frankfurt via Singapore. A Frankfurt abdication would end Qantas services to the European continent, and further diminish the value of Qantas frequent flyer points, which are predominantly collected with a view to flying to London, which will shrink to two Qantas flights a day all the way from the end of March to allow the airline to expand into Asia with a premium quality short haul airline that will make so much money that Qantas will be able to re-expand its overseas operations in five years time.

No, we aren’t joking. That’s the Alan Joyce CEO plan for Qantas.