The low-cost subsidiary of Singapore Airlines will be serving East Kalimantan’s oil boomtown twice a week.
Photo: Scoot
New Year’s Day marked the start of an additional daily service run by Scoot to the second city of the Philippines, with Airbus A320s deployed for the three-hour and 50-minute journey. Outbound flight TR388 takes off from Changi at 5:30 p.m. every evening to land in Mactan–Cebu International Airport at 9:20 p.m. TR389 will then leave Cebu at 10:30 p.m. and return to Singapore at 2:15 a.m. The extra frequency on the route complements Scoot’s existing midday departure from Singapore.
Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the budget carrier plans to resume direct flights to Indonesian Borneo on January 27. Scoot is also utilizing A320s that will operate twice a week, taking an estimated two hours and 35 minutes to reach Balikpapan. TR222 will depart from Singapore at 2 p.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays; the estimated arrival time at Balikpapan’s Sepinggan International Airport is 4:35 p.m. Return flight TR223 will take off from Sepinggan at 5:15 p.m. and touch down in Changi at 7:30 p.m.
Balikpapan is Scoot’s ninth destination in Indonesia after Bali, Jakarta, Lombok, Makassar, Manado, Pekanbaru, Surabaya, and Yogyakarta. Before its recent merger with Singapore Airlines, now-defunct regional subsidiary SilkAir served all the aforementioned places save Jakarta. SilkAir was meant to transfer Singapore–Balikpapan and five other Indonesian routes to Scoot in mid-2020, but the pandemic abruptly halted those plans. SilkAir previously flew to Palembang in Sumatra and Bandung and Semarang in Java; Scoot has not yet made any announcements about resuming regular services to those three cities.
