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Air New Zealand's chief executive has said his airline wants to expand its China services in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics by building on the experience gained on its Auckland-Shanghai route and its relationship with Chinese airlines.
Chief executive Rob Fyfe, who is in Beijing Thursday for the formalities around Air China and Shanghai Airlines joining the global airline grouping Star Alliance, said the success of the inbound Shanghai-Auckland service depended very heavily on the connections with the Chinese airlines.
"We rely very heavily on both Air China and Shanghai Airlines to feed us at that (the Shanghai) gateway," The New Zealand Press Association (NZPA), the nation's news agency, on Thursday quoted him as saying.
The Shanghai service drew significant numbers of Chinese tourists, around 80 percent of inbound visitors on the Shanghai service were tourists, Fyfe added.
Fyfe said Air New Zealand had started with three Auckland-Shanghai services a week but had now expanded that to five and would like to lift that to seven by August 2008.
Tourism New Zealand has predicted China could be New Zealand's third biggest inbound tourism market within five years. The number of Chinese visitors has jumped nearly 400 percent since 2000 with almost 120,000 visiting in the year to October, according to NZPA.
Tourism NZ chief executive George Hickton told an inbound tour operators forum last week that the number of inbound visitors from China could double again by 2012 as a booming Chinese economy meant wages were rising fast, creating an affluent younger travel sector which was likely to have different travel expectations.
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