Leo Tudela
COMMONWEALTH Ports Authority Executive Director Leo B. Tudela on Tuesday said Hong Kong Airlines will resume its flight service to the CNMI from April 29 to Oct. 27, 2024.
“I just received the airline company’s letter five minutes ago today,” Tudela told Variety.
Hong Kong Airlines’ A-330 airbus will fly to Saipan twice a week, Monday and Friday, he said.
This is good news in light of Asiana Airlines’ suspension of its Incheon-Saipan flights indefinitely, he added. Asiana’s last scheduled flight to Saipan was on March 3.
But Tudela said Asiana will provide charter flights to Saipan two days a week, Thursday and Sunday, until the end of June.
He said it’s a corporate decision that the airline had to make, but CPA is thankful to Asiana Airlines for its charter flights. “We need more tourists to come here,” he added. “We have a very good relationship with Asiana and other airlines.”
Tudela said many Koreans “love the CNMI and they always want to come back to the islands.”
He said Asiana’s regular flights to Saipan that started in December and ended this month provided a “window of opportunity for us to make everything good for them to come back, especially for those who came here for the first time.”
In its recent report about the CNMI, the U.S. Government Accountability Office noted that the local tourism industry is still “struggling.” The report added, “Tourism, the main driver of the economy, experienced a small increase in 2022 compared with 2020 but has not returned to pre-2017 levels, prior to the typhoon and the pandemic. The number of annual visitors remained below 100,000 in 2022 compared with nearly 700,000 in 2017.”
In 2023, there were 215,543 arrivals, according to the Marianas Visitors Authority.
