Cambodia’s national carrier Angkor Air launched a new Cambodia-Macau route, which will operate two weekly flights on Wednesday and Sunday, in a ceremony at the Macau airport on Wednesday.
The flight will connect Sihanoukville International Airport to Macau. It is the airport’s second international route after Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and the airline’s eighth international route after Bangkok, Danang, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City and Shanghai.
Angkor Air’s marketing manager Eng Molina told the Khmer Times in Cambodia that “the airline added the route because of an increase in passengers wanting to travel between the destinations.”
Molina said the airline has a partner to sell tickets in Macau, “which makes the route a good business opportunity” and added that Angkor Air expects most passengers to fly from Macau to Preah Sihanouk province, rather than in the opposite direction.
“There is high demand for seats from Macau to Preah Sihanouk province, so we will depend on customers from the Macau market,” he said.
“We are also studying the possibility of a route from Phnom Penh to Macau, but we are not 100 percent sure because we are waiting to see how this route works [first].”
Angkor Air’s Deputy CEO, Lim Kao, said after the inauguration that a flight to Siem Reap is a strong possibility, as the place is home to UNESCO heritage sites like Angkor Wat.
According to the Cambodian Tourism Ministry, about 830,000 Chinese tourists visited Cambodia last year, representing a 19.5 percent hike year-on-
year. Chinese nationals are the country’s second-largest group of visitors after the Vietnamese, in a country that reported more than five million visitors last year.
The Cambodian government has said it hopes to increase the number of Chinese tourists from 830,000 at present to about two million by 2020. The new flights are a part of this initiative.
Sihanoukville is a coastal city on the peninsula, facing the Gulf of Thailand. The location is known as Cambodia’s premier beach town, with long white sand beaches, excellent seafood and several tropical islands nearby. It has been compared to some of Thailand’s most visited beach destinations. RM
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