Viet Nam’s Bamboo Airways chooses Oz for inc’l debut

Bamboo Airways (QH, Hanoi) will make its intercontinental debut with the launch of scheduled flights between Ho Chi Minh City and Melbourne Tullamarine on April 1, 2022. It will also be the first new international route by any carrier to Melbourne since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Vietnamese carrier will operate the route using B787-9 aircraft, initially 2x weekly, but with a view to doubling the frequency in future. It said that the choice of the destination was motivated by significant demand from the Vietnamese diaspora; around a third of some 300,000 Vietnamese-Australians live in Melbourne. The city is also a popular destination for Vietnamese workers and students. In the future, the airline plans to connect Melbourne with Hanoi as well.

Bamboo Airways will compete directly with Vietnam Airlines (VN, Hanoi), which operates from Ho Chi Minh City to both Melbourne and Sydney Kingsford Smith, the ch-aviation schedules module shows. Before the pandemic, Jetstar Airways (JQ, Melbourne Tullamarine) used to ply the route as well.

Due to prevailing entry restrictions in Viet Nam, Bamboo Airways’ scheduled network is currently all-domestic and even before the pandemic, it did not venture outside of Asia. It was supposed to launch services to Prague Václav Havel, its first intercontinental service, just as COVID-19 grounded most global international traffic. Bamboo Airways has been touting services to the US West Coast, planning to launch them in late 2021 or early 2022, but has yet to announce any specific timeline. For now, its services to Melbourne are its only confirmed intercontinental route.