Hawaiian Airlines will expand toward Asia as it seeks new sources of revenue to bolster it through a local fare war.
The carrier will begin four weekly flights between Honolulu and Manila in March. Hawaiian chief executive Mark Dunkerly expects considerable ethnic or family traffic because almost 300,000 people - nearly a quarter of the residents of Hawaii - are of Filipino descent.
Hawaiian has long enjoyed the heavy ethnic traffic of Hawaiian residents visiting expatriate communities on the US mainland. Hawaiian also serves Tahiti, American Samoa and Sydney.
Hawaiian and its hometown rival Aloha are locked in an intra-island fare war with go!, a regional jet operation launched in 2006 by Mesa Air Group. Go! has lowered fares on local flights but is enmeshed in a lengthy lawsuit in which Hawaiian charges that Mesa executives illegally obtained confidential data while inspecting Hawaiian's books and records during their consideration of an acquisition bid while it was in bankruptcy reorganisation.
The judge in the case has issued a tentative ruling favouring Hawaiian but the case continues. Mesa has placed its chief financial officer, George Peter Murnane, on administrative leave pending the outcome. Hawaiian is claiming Murnane destroyed evidence after it filed its lawsuit against Mesa last year. Mesa claimed in court that Murnane accidentally erased files pertaining to the lawsuit while he was deleting pornographic content from work computers.
Source: Airline Business
