JAKARTA: The Transportation Ministry has pointed to transit flights as a major reason behind persisting high prices for domestic flights, despite the government’s fare discount stimulus ahead of this year’s concurrent Nyepi (Day of Silence) and Aidilfitri holidays.
The ministry’s Air Transportation Director Agustinus Budi Hartono linked the high airfares circulating on social media to transit flights, explaining that economy class tickets for direct domestic flights, which were eligible for the government discount, had sold out.
“It turns out that some transit (flights) have more than one (stop), causing the prices to swell,” Agustinus told a press conference on Tuesday.
Citing an example, he said direct flights were unavailable to travel from Manokwari in West Papua to Padang in West Sumatra, so passengers had to shell out between eight million rupiah and nine million rupiah for a flight that transited in Jakarta.
But Agustinus said the ministry had recently found tickets as high as 16 to 17 million rupiah for transit flights plying this route, which created “a slight misperception among the public”.
“Some foreign airlines were offering tickets for flights to domestic destinations that required transiting abroad, suggesting this practice ‘violated’ Indonesia’s cabotage principle mandating that domestic routes be served by local airlines.” — The Jakarta Post/ANN
