Singapore’s Scoot to enter EU fifth freedom market

Scoot (TR, Singapore Changi) has announced that it will enter the European market with fifth freedom return flights between Athens Int’l and Berlin Brandenburg Int’l, operated as an extension of the carrier’s service from Singapore Changi to the Greek capital.

The low-cost carrier plans to begin flying from Singapore via Athens to Berlin, with full commercial rights on the intra-European sector, on August 10, 2021. Flights will operate 3x weekly and will replace the existing Singapore-Athens non-stop services. Scoot will deploy B787-8s on the route.

The Singaporean carrier resumed flights to Athens, its first restarted European route, on May 25, 2021, a full 14 months after it suspended the route. Before the pandemic, Scoot served Berlin Tegel (now closed and replaced by Brandenburg International airport) as a stand-alone non-stop route from Singapore.

“Linking Berlin and Singapore via Athens allows Scoot to tap on summer holiday demand between Germany and Greece, given that intra-Europe border measures have eased, and more efficiently supports travel demand from Europe to Singapore and Scoot’s broader Asia Pacific network, so that we can resume our network in a calibrated manner,” the airline said.

In a recent interview with ch-aviation, Scoot’s Chief Executive Campbell Wilson highlighted that the carrier might opportunistically revive its European network more quickly than some of its core regional routes, considering that European travel restrictions are currently much less strict than those in China or Australia.

While Scoot does not serve any other European destinations than Athens and soon Berlin, its parent company, Singapore Airlines (SQ, Singapore Changi), continues to operate exclusively passenger flights to 11 European destinations, passenger and cargo flights to Amsterdam Schiphol and London Heathrow, and only cargo flights to Brussels National, the ch-aviation capacities module shows.