SEATTLE — Taiwanese startup Starlux Airlines officially added Seattle to its route map on 16 August, its third North American destination. The new route to the Pacific Northwest also formally launched a strategic partnership with Seattle-based Alaska Airlines, a move that Starlux hopes will be the key to its success in the US.
The route currently operates three times weekly, with intentions to expand to daily service early in 2025. It is operated with a four cabin Airbus A350-900 widebody jet, facilitating four passengers in first class, 26 in business class, 36 in premium economy, and 240 in economy.
For those unfamiliar, Starlux is a relatively new Taipei-based airline. It is the brainchild of former EVA Air chairman Chang Kuo-wei, who founded Starlux after an internal power struggle at EVA sent him packing.
Starlux launched in January 2020 to great fanfare, and then immediately hit the pause button along with the rest of the world as Covid spread across the globe. It gradually rebuilt its nascent short and medium-haul network with a plethora of intra-east Asia flights. Between Covid and airplane delivery delays, the first long-haul route came in April 2023, to Los Angeles. San Francisco followed some months later.
The airline describes itself as a luxury boutique airline that aims to be the “Emirates of Asia”. And it leans hard into that aspiration. A brand-new cadre of short and long-haul Airbus jets anchor the fleet. The carrier’s stunning interiors were designed by BMW Designworks. Its hard products are chock full of the latest PaxEx tech across all cabins.
Starlux has also developed onboard collaborations with major brands like Peanuts and the LA Clippers, and even has a signature scent, a pleasing mixture of wood, leather, iris and violent from Taiwanese perfumer P.Seven.
Yet it is still a new entrant, at least to North America. And Seattle is a good example of the type of headwinds a new entrant can face.
Starlux is the last of three airlines to launch service between Seattle and Taipei this year alone, with Delta and China Airlines having gone before it. All three join the long-time route incumbent EVA Air. That has pushed this market in particular from something like 3,400 seats weekly to over 7,000. And Starlux, besides being new, is the only carrier of the four not tied to an alliance.
None of that seems to bother the folks at Starlux all that much.
Lux experience, commensurate pricing
For one, its fares have remained high across the board — particularly in the premium cabins. You’d think all that competition and its relatively weak position in the market might put pressure on the airline to reduce fares, a tactic that would not only fill seats but also increase awareness and exposure. But that hasn’t been the case.
Staying true to its ‘lux’ ambitions, pricing has remained on par or higher than both China Airlines and EVA Air across all three of its North American destinations.
Starlux is delivering impressively premium PaxEx aboard its widebodies. Image: Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren
This isn’t an accident. Starlux officials told CNN in a December 2019 pre-launch interview that all those amenities equals a higher cost: “we offer exquisite service items, so the fare will be slightly higher than the other airlines.”
Conscious capacity choices
Second, while some industry watchers see the explosion of service to Seattle be an unsustainable glut of seats, Starlux disagrees.
“I think the capacity put into this route is the still rather small,” Starlux chief strategy officer Simon Liu told Runway Girl Network in a recent interview.
“We’re not only targeting traffic between Taipei and Seattle,” he said. “Look into the entire network in Southeast Asia and combine the population between Southeast Asia and North America. It is huge.”
Indeed, Starlux’s intra-Asia network, which began in earnest in 2021 after a Covid pause, leans heavy into Southeast Asia. Japan is also well represented, rounding out the whose who of popular destinations in Asia for Americans.
Codeshare beneifts
Third, Seattle isn’t just about Seattle. It’s also about Alaska; Alaska Airlines, that is. The codeshare is Starlux’s first, enabling passengers on both carriers to book itineraries on either carrier from either website.
“It helps us connect our passengers from Seattle to more than 100 cities in the US, making us very confident of our operation in Seattle”, Liu told RGN.
Though he declined to give precise numbers, Alaska, he said, has been a huge help in filling out its nascent Seattle flights, both in terms of cash booking and mileage redemptions. The first flight to Taipei went out with a 99% load factor, and RGN’s flight with Starlux a few days later was similarly full.
Liu said the partnership has seen Seattle’s forward bookings already outperforming both San Francisco and Los Angeles, both of which have been running daily service for months.
Whether or not Starlux will formally join an alliance is not currently clear. Oneworld would make a lot of sense, but Liu said only that the airline was looking at alliances carefully.
As for where Starlux will expand to next, Liu said a few more Southeast Asia destinations are in the pipeline, including Jakarta. North American plans remain more hazy, or at least if Liu knows, he’s keeping it close to the vest.
“Everybody talks about New York, and New York is under our radar. But we are also looking into many destinations,” he said, before rattling off cities like Chicago, Dallas, D.C., and Phoenix.
Many of those cities are dependent on the carrier receiving more airplanes, something Starlux like many others, has struggled with of late.
“Overall, the aircraft delivery status with both Boeing and Airbus is getting challenging,” he said. “We do what we can, build our plan with more flexibility.” But delays on building out the network are inevitable, he said.
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Featured image credited to Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren
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Publish date : 2024-08-26 00:32:00
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