Scoot Not Keen on Singapore"s Terminal 4 "Folly," CEO Says

Singapore Airlines Ltd.’s budget

carrier Scoot doesn’t want to use the city’s new terminal

because it lacks connections to the rest of the airport and

sufficient berths for large jets, the unit’s chief executive

officer said.

Changi airport’s S$1.28 billion ($1 billion) Terminal Four,

which is being designed to handle 16 million passengers a year

when it opens in 2017, has only four bays for widebody aircraft

and will lack a light-rail connection to the other terminals,

Scoot Airways Pte CEO Campbell Wilson said at a conference in

Sydney today. Scoot currently uses Boeing Co. 777 widebody

aircraft and will get its Dreamliners from November.

Scoot, which has flown about three million passengers since

it started services in June 2012, is owned by Changi’s largest

user Singapore Air and code-shares flights with budget carrier

Tiger Airways Holdings Ltd., in which the city-state’s flag

carrier has 40 percent stake. Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific

Airways Ltd. in April became the first airline to announce a

move to the new terminal.

“This terminal is a big folly, frankly,” Wilson said at

the event. “It really detracts from the whole purpose of

building a hub airport in the first place and I think it would

be a very severe retrograde step for Changi.”

A shift to T4 “is not an attractive proposition for us,

and so therefore it is not something that we are looking to

do,” he later said on the sidelines of the event. “On balance

we would likely stay in the main terminals.”

Scoot, Tiger

Scoot and Tiger, both Singapore-based budget carriers, have

an agreement to feed passengers into each other’s network. In

February, the Competition Commission of Singapore said it’s

seeking feedback on the proposed plan to enhance their tieup.

T4 will give airlines “room for growth in the medium

term,” Changi Airport Group spokesman Ivan Tan said in an e-mailed statement. “Unlike the previous budget terminal, T4 will

allow for airside transfers, enabling passengers to connect to

onward flights at the other terminals without having to clear

immigration.”

Changi Airport is “confident” that the current minimum

connecting time for transfers between Scoot and other airlines

at T2 can be achieved for transfers across T2 and T4, Tan said.

Seventeen narrow-body aircraft and four widebody aircraft

will be able to connect directly to the airport terminal via air

bridges, according to a statement from Changi last November. The

airport will link T4 with other terminals through shuttles.

“For a carrier operating with potentially partners in the

other terminals, it has a detrimental effect on either actual

connectivity or perceived connectivity, both of which are

detrimental to our business and by extension the Singapore hub,

and by extension the economic benefits that go to Singapore from

that,” Wilson said.

To contact the reporter on this story:

David Fickling in Sydney at

dfickling@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:

Anand Krishnamoorthy at

anandk@bloomberg.net

Scoot Not Keen on Singapore"s Terminal 4 "Folly," CEO Says