Why doesn't Cathay Pacific fly to Moscow?
 

Just wondering why CX doesn't fly to oneworld hub Moscow (S7 DME)?. Moscow is the largest city in Europe and is pretty wealthly, all the CN3 plus HNA fly to Moscow and moscow is extremely popular with Chinese tourists. This is surely the biggest hole in Europe for CX in my opinion.

They tried it and then pulled out. I don’t know why it failed.

My completely uneducated guess is that it has something to do with demand and load factors.

And to refer to SME as a OW hub is a bit of a stretch.

The sanctions on Russia didn't help either.

I guess during the winter loads could be a problem, because during northern winter China eastern only flies 4 times a week to Moscow compared to 14 times a week during the Northern summer. Russia is a highly seasonal tourist destination.

HK Airlines also tried and pulled out.

Cathay gave its rationale here: https://news.cathaypacific.com/catha...om-june-180140, as hkskyline mentions above, the sanctions contributed.

See also https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/cath...ch-moscow.html

I wonder if the "high operating costs" mentioned in the 2014 press release are code for a certain sort of extra payment doing business in Russia sometime requires and has an unfortunate reputation for. I know some business people that looked at expanding into Russia but declined after finding out the number of extra payments they had to make made the venture uneconomical. Hopefully this wouldn't extend to the world of airlines.

Any airline would have a list of cities it would be considering entering and a team of analysts to see if it would work. Passenger numbers, cargo, ground handling, aircraft and crew availability are all things that need to be thrown into the mix to see what is viable and profitable.

istanbul is largest city in europe

moscow average salary is us$1400 a mth, london is closer to $4k a month (source first result in google)

so both is clearly not a factor for CX i suppose

Yes Russia’s economy did go down in 2015 and CX were using A340’s at the time.
TG also suspended DME in 2015 but a year latter came back...and TG is even worse state than CX

Maybe the awful financial state of TG is partly explained by irrational business decisions such as that one :)

Of course, Thailand is a huge market for Russian tourists. And the demise of Transaero which had many flights to Thailand was an opportunity for TG.

Why would mainlanders transfer in HKG for Moscow? Quite a backtrack.

SU fare to HKG is usually very cheap which might be related to low demand.

CX has a DME flight but it probably didn’t work out well.

SQ is keeping DME. It used to be SIN-DME-IAH but sanctions changed the IAH leg.

-CA, CZ, MU, and HU fly from Mainland China to Moscow nonstop
-what makes you think that Chinese tourists would be willing to tack on an extra ~5 hours (each way) to their trips in order to fly CX/KA via HKG?
-how low would CX need to price its fares in order to capture 10-20-30% of this market?
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-would HKG-DME/SVO service provide a better ROI/ROA than other options?

Don’t forget about Russia-Bali, Russia-philippines and Russia-Aus/Nz traffic

China eastern and China southern flight to Moscow from Shanghai and Guangzhou/Shenzhen for economy in August next year are all slightly more than 1000USD return. Not exactly low yielding for that distance.

Hong Kong-Sydney in August next year with CX is only 500-600usd return. Very low yielding indeed

Low yields, for the most part.

Yes, they are able to charge a premium for nonstop routes.

About the same price as HKG-SVO nonstop on SU.