Europe is home to some of the most important financial centres and advanced technologies in the world. Singapore’s connectivity to the region has developed both our economy and air hub over the years.
As of 31 March 2018, Singapore is connected to 17 cities across Europe with nine airlines operating more than 170 weekly services.
In FY2017/18 alone, we added two new city links—Stockholm (SIA) and Athens (Scoot), providing alternative gateways to Scandinavia and the Mediterranean. Singapore’s link to Scandinavia was boosted with the launch of Singapore Airlines’ new service to Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, which is one of the fastest growing economies in the region. With increased flight options for tourism and business flows to Scandinavia, CAG worked jointly with the embassies of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden to organise a destination promotion event within Changi Airport featuring key tourism attractions and products of renowned companies from the region, such as Lego and Nihola.
Meanwhile, we continued to strengthen our existing city links. Lufthansa started its Munich-Singapore service, offering passengers—particularly time-sensitive business travellers—an alternative to the existing daily flight. Other markets such as Amsterdam, Zurich and Istanbul also saw increased seat capacity as the existing airlines, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines and Turkish Airlines, deployed larger aircraft to Singapore.
The 'Kangaroo Route' saw the return of Qantas Airways with its Sydney-Singapore-London A380 services which simultaneously increased capacity for its Singapore-Melbourne and Singapore-Perth routes.
As a result of the expanded air links, traffic to Europe grew by a strong double-digit growth of 10%. As a premier transfer hub between Europe and Southwest Pacific, CAG continues to work with various travel trade and business partners to further strengthen existing links and grow new city links for the future.