Thai Airways reduces Australian network

Thai Airways has officially announced that as part of its network optimization drive under a new management team, it shall be reducing its Australian services from the on set of the IATA W18 season in order to cut down on losses. The changes are as follows:

SYD - frequencies reduced from 11 weekly to daily using a B744

BNE - frequencies reduced from daily to 4 weekly using a B788

MEL - frequencies reduced from double daily to 11 weekly using an A359 exclusively

Comments:

Whenever the Thai Govt appoints a new management team, it seems that the first thing they set out to do is to play a game of musical chairs with its long haul route network. 

The IATA winter season (nov-mar) is peak season for Australia bound traffic from both EU + Asia hence making this announcement more surprising. 

As far as P2P traffic is concerned between BKK and the above 3 Aussie cities between 2016 and 2017 (full year), it was as follows

round trip pax below

SYD - an increase from 226,000 to 231,000   

MEL - an increase from 167,000 to 182,000 

BNE - an increase from 86,000 to 89,000