How to Make Colombo a hub like Singapore

When Emirates took over the management of SriLankan Airlines, one of the biggest promises was to turn Colombo into a hub. However, many obstacles such as terrorist attacks and a not so healthy local economy coupled with never before heard global threats such as the SARS and tsunami caused those promises to fade off. But now, with a three decade old war against terrorism over and the global recession showing signs of recovery – can Colombo again live up to its dream of becoming a hub ? AIR finds out.

The Airport

Colombo Bandaranaike International Airport ( CMB/VCBI ) is the only international airport in Sri Lanka with a single 3350m long runway and a passenger terminal with a capacity of a little over 3mn passengers annually. Being a part of traditional sea trade roads, and being one of the most popular tea and clothing exporters, it also has a sizeable amount of cargo activity making it one of the top 100 international cargo airports.
The airport is home to three airlines – SriLankan Airlines ( UL ); the national carrier, Mihin Lanka ( MJ ); a state owned low fare carrier, and Expo Air ( 8D ); an all cargo operator.
Two main traffic banks can be identified in the airport’s daily operations. The first is from 6-8 am, with a number of arrivals of Middle Eastern carriers and the complete South and South East Asian departure bank of SriLankan Airlines. This is the highest peak of the airport’s daily operations with no less than 30 movements and most of them with widebodies.
The next bank of traffic comes into effect from 2-4pm with many flights of airlines from India and all of SriLankan Airlines’ Middle Eastern departures. Mixing into this flow are the second daily flight of Qatar Airways and Emirates’ DXB-CMB-SIN flight.
There is also a good number of movements at midnight, with all the redeye flights of South East Asian airlines such as Singapore Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Thai Airways and Cathay Pacific – all of which are again widebodies.
The most active carrier at the airport is SriLankan Airlines, which operates an all Airbus fleet of A320s, A330-200s and A340-300s to 44 destinations in Europe, Middle East, South Asia and South East Asia.
The next most active carrier at the airport is, unsusppisingly, Emirates, with a total of 18 weekly flights, all of which are operated by Boeing 777-300ERs. This is closely followed by Qatar Airways with 14 weekly flights and plans for a third daily flight pending regulatory approval.

On the cargo front, the most active carrier is Expo Air with its fleet of Western and Russian freighters and some of the other cargo operators to the airport include Midex Airlines, China Airlines, MASkargo and Etihad Crystal Cargo. The airport also has three cargo villages with sizeable warehouses .
Landing and parking fees are not the lowest of the region, but also not the highest. The landing fee is $4 per thousand kilograms and parking fees are free for the first three hours. Air bridge charges begin at $75, but airlines can also opt to use a different apron and transport passengers via buses to the terminal.

What is in a hub ?

Sri Lanka is situated just below India and it certainly is no mistake to call it as being in the middle of global cross roads. It is the middle point whether you consider flying from Johannesburg to Tokyo, London to Sydney or Dubai to Singapore.
Sri Lanka is also the home to the M3 air corridor which is one of the largest air corridors of the region and the country also has many major connecting points of main airways such as G465, A463, P570 and B340 in its airspace which makes Colombo a favourite transit stop to long haul flights.
Colombo also has a catchment area of around 1.5bn population within three hours of flying time .
These reasons makes Colombo an interesting transit point.

However, it is not realistic for Colombo to plan of grabbing a share of the Kangaroo route as this route is tightly held up to a large by Emirates and Singapore Airlines at their respective hubs. -
But there are many markets that Colombo can tap which are still largely untapped.
Africa and Australia will play a large part in Colombo’s potential transit market.

India – Australia
Currently the sole air link between India and Australia is Qantas’ flights between Sydney and Mumbai. But this certainly is an underserved market and most of the time travelers between Australia and India transit at either Singapore, Kuala Lampur or Bangkok adding a few more hundreds of miles to their trip. This is where Colombo becomes a great option. It is an uncongested airport and also a direct route to India.

Australia – East Africa
East Africa is a popular holiday destination not just for Australians, but many other global travelers. But there is currently not a single air link between East Africa and Australia. Passengers will always have to take the long route and connect at Dubai, Singapore or occasionally, Johannesburg. Why not Colombo ?

Far East – East Africa
Ethiopian Airlines and Kenya Airways offer some flights from Beijing, Guangzhou and Bangkok to their respective hubs. But there is still a large share of the market untapped and being directly in the middle of this route, Colombo can certainly offer a good connection.

But none of these markets are the most lucrative. That is..
Rest of the World – South Asia
Many South Asians reside in countries such as UK, Australia and the USA. Few good examples are Sri Lanka having the largest Sri Lankan communtity outside its home country in Melbourne and India having very sizeable Indian communties in Manchester, London and the USA. But most of the time, sufficient air services are not available and most of the passengers transit at larger hubs such as Dubai and Singapore. With its strategic location and close proximity to anywhere in South Asia ( with both Kabul and Dhaka – the farthest corners of the subcontinent – less than 3 hrs away ), Colombo can certainly become the gateway to South Asia.

Another added advantage is Sri Lanka’s popularity as a holiday destination, which will greatly enhance Colombo as a destination and will also make it a first choice for stopover packages.

The Reality
However, the reality is that the national carrier SriLankan is not financially sound enough to spoil Colombo’s strategic location as a hub. Being pressured by the largest loss in its history and having no investor to bail it out, SriLankan is not in a position to expand and make Colombo the gateway to South Asia.

This makes Colombo an interesting hub for one airline in the region – AirAsia .
I personally do not see any other airline that can exploit Colombo’s potential as a hub, to the maximum as much as AirAsia.
Although AirAsia X has already chosen Abu Dhabi to be its next hub, Colombo certainly has even greater potential than Abu Dhabi with some ‘fine tuning’.
Colombo can become an excellent entry point for AirAsia to India and the rest of South Asia, while AirAsia X can restlessly feed passengers from all over the world into Colombo for connecting on AirAsia.
The A330-300s that AirAsia X has on order can easily fly up to Sydney, Johannesburg, Beijing or Rome from Colombo without compromising on the payload and needless to say tourist traffic to Sri Lanka will certainly fill a third of the flight.
None of the region’s local airlines can match either the fares or the unit cost of AirAsia and it will certainly be a success story for AirAsia.
But like I mentioned earlier, this will need some fine tuning. And this fine tuning will be none other than a Low Cost Terminal and lower airport charges. And this fine tuning certainly will easily become a reality if AirAsia can educate the government on how beneficial a Low Cost Terminal is to the country and how it can also help government’s LCC Mihin Lanka.
It is a long way to go, but is for sure doable.
What do you think ? Please leave a comment.

All the photos on this article are extracted from Flickr and are fully copyright reserved to their original authors.

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