As the first weekend of cross-strait flights comes to an end, domestic airlines said they remained cautiously optimistic about the new route's prospects.

"We anticipate that the number of reservations [for future weekends] will increase closer to the departure dates," Bruce Chen, deputy director of public relations at China Airlines Co (CAL), said yesterday by telephone.

Chen said that reservations for CAL charter flights in the second week remained at 80 percent, with reservations for the third week at 70 percent.

UPBEAT

He was upbeat on the new flight's longer-term outlook, citing three categories of passenger sources — international travelers taking advantage of cross-strait charter flights to stop in Taiwan for business or sightseeing before embarking on trips to China; Chinese tourists and businesspeople and Taiwanese tourists and businesspeople.

For round-trip flights from Taoyuan International Airport to Shanghai Pudong Airport, CAL is charging NT$16,650 for economy class and NT$24,400 for business class before a tax of NT$2,669. Its ticket pricing for the next weekend has yet to be announced, but Chen yesterday said that cross-strait charter flight rates would be kept stable for the next month or two.

Although the flights' short-term gains are limited, Liang Kuo-yuan, president of Polaris Research Institute, said yesterday that he believed the flights would provide a bigger boost to the local economy in the long-run, especially as cargo-related business opportunities increase when direct cargo transportation is further relaxed.

"The high-tech industry will reap the most benefit from the aid of air cargo [once it is implemented]," Liang said yesterday by phone.

TRIANGLE

A unique triangle in the high-tech industry exists between the US, Taiwan and China, with each country complimenting the others, he said.

The US concentrates on marketing and R&D, while Taiwan takes orders from the US and does a small amount of in-house R&D. Taiwan then turns around and places manufacturing orders to Chinese factories, which come up with the new product lines, Liang said.

The triangle will greatly benefit from cross-strait travel, he said, because products and ideas will be exchanged even faster through the use of cargo flights, compared with the current use of shipping.

"Through cargo flights, high-tech business can reach even higher efficiencies, so more profit will be generated," Liang said.

Currently, weekend chartered flights only have a negative impact on the existing business from Hong Kong and Macao routes, Liang said.

MOMENTUM

Mike Lo, an aviation specialist and former chairman of Far Eastern Air Transport, was also optimistic.

"It will take time for cross-strait travel to build momentum. But certainly a solid customer base will be built in the near-medium term," he said yesterday by telephone. "By then, the 3,000-passenger-per-day quota will need to be increased many times over to accommodate the flux of cross-strait travel."