Hawaiian Airlines is expanding service to Los Angeles and Sydney as it continues down its fast-growth track.
The state’s oldest carrier, which already has announced plans to inaugurate new service to Fukuoka, Japan, and New York next year, said Monday it will add a third daily flight between Los Angeles and Honolulu starting June 7. It previously offered this flight on a seasonal basis to accommodate peak summer travel demand. The switch to daily from seasonal service on the Los Angeles-Honolulu flight will add more than 70,000 seats annually between the two cities.
“The growth of our long-haul fleet allows us to add this third daily flight on a permanent basis to better accommodate the strong demand for our service in Southern California year-round and provide our customers with more schedule options,” Hawaiian President and CEO Mark Dunkerley said.
The new year-round flight will depart Los Angeles at 10:30 a.m. and arrive in Honolulu at 1:10 p.m. The return flight will depart Honolulu daily at 10:20 p.m. and arrive in Los Angeles the following morning at 6:45 a.m.
Hawaiian, which previously said it was boosting its Sydney-Honolulu route to daily from five days a week starting Wednesday, said Monday it will switch in May to the larger Airbus A330-200 for the Sydney route. It had been using a Boeing 767-300ER. The Airbus seats 294 passengers, 30 more than the Boeing 767.
Hawaiian said increasing its frequency to daily from five days a week will boost capacity by 40 percent and add approximately 12,000 seats on the route between Sydney and Honolulu.
The airline also said that seating capacity will increase by nearly 11,000 seats annually — the equivalent of 41 additional Boeing 767 flights — when the larger aircraft begins flying that route in May.
Hawaiian has five A330s in service and will add four more A330s by mid-2012 as it phases out its fleet of Boeing 767s.
Separately, Hawaiian finished first among 16 domestic carriers for punctuality as 94.7 percent of its flights arrived on time in October, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report issued Monday. The national average was 85.5 percent.
Hawaiian also had the fewest canceled flights with nine cancellations out of 5,485 flights, or less than 0.2 percent.
In other categories, Hawaiian was sixth for consumer complaints with 0.57 (a total of four complaints) per 100,000 enplanements, and seventh for mishandled baggage reports with 2.38 per 1,000 passengers.
