China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空), the nation’s largest carrier, will add two more Chinese cities to its destination list in September at the earliest, the airline said yesterday.
CAL will serve Yancheng in Jiangsu Province and Sanya in Hainan Province with two scheduled flights to each city, the airline said.
Meanwhile, EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空), the second-largest carrier in the nation, said it is still working on a service expansion to Yancheng and it intends to have one direct flight to the city each week.
Yancheng is adjacent to Shanghai and can make up for the shortage of services to Shanghai, where demand exceeds supply, CAL said. However, the new flights will not be able to rely solely on Taiwanese businesspeople traveling across the Strait and the company will have to attract more Chinese tourists from these cities to Taiwan, the airline said.
The latest addition of new destinations is part of a cross-strait agreement signed on June 8 to increase the number of direct flights between Taiwan and China from 370 to 558 per week, with each side being given an extra 94 flights. The additional flights will not be able to start before the end of October, Civil Aeronautics Administration Director-General Ying Chen-pong (尹承蓬) said on July 13.
As of the end of last year, Yancheng had approved 748 investment cases from Taiwanese companies and had more than 700 Taiwanese businesses registered in the city. There are more than 100,000 Taiwanese people living in Yancheng, while more than 30,000 Yancheng residents visited Taiwan in tour groups last year.
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