Asian LCCs create new city-pairs, market dominance. Full-service carriers ignore them at their peril

Low-cost carriers have two primary impacts: first they stimulate new traffic and second they divert traffic from full-service counterparts. Some legacy airlines are adamant that LCCs will not impact their existing network and thus do not need to consider any response to LCCs. This is an old world argument often proved wrong; but even if it had merit it would not excuse legacy carriers from ignoring the opportunistic impact of LCCs: creating new growth.

LCCs are the sole or majority operator on 27% of short-haul capacity at Singapore Changi and 60% at Kuala Lumpur. This potential upside is no small sector to ignore.

One final argument from full-service airlines is that their strategy is to have a frequency advantage. But looking at markets like Singapore-Jakarta where LCCs do not account for the majority of capacity, they do account for the majority of frequencies. Asian growth is still in its infancy but for an indicator of the future could look to Europe, where the region's two biggest airlines are LCCs: Ryanair and easyJet. Moreover they are still growing, unlike their legacy counterparts.