why can some airlines stop over a country and then continue on another country? Wouldn’t the airline “steal” a share of the passengers from the host country?
​
example: KLM goes from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur and then it continues to Jakarta.
In: 0
There are often agreements between several airlines and countries allowing this.
The stopover Country gets money from landing fees, refueling may be required, so it is a win.
As long as the seats are bought and paid for, it doesn’t matter. A flight is a service, like a restaurant; the customer is allowed to choose what restaurant to go to, just like how they can choose what flight/airline they want to take to their destination.
Stopovers and layovers are common because it’s unlikely that every single person’s origin and destination has a flight going directly to/from those places. Let’s say someone is flying from a rural town in the middle of Kansas to Berlin, Germany. There’s no way that the rural Kansas airport will have the facilities to service an international jet capable of flying to Germany; nor would an airline set aside an international jet for this one person. So they might fly from rural Kansas to Chicago O’Hare International Airport, where there are a lot more people who might want to go to Berlin. Then they can pool all those passengers together and put them on an international jet from Chicago to Berlin. The stopover in Chicago hasn’t “stolen” Chicago passengers; it’s part of the system to get that Kansas passenger to Germany.
[It’s part of agreed upon methods of air travel. ](https://youtu.be/thqbjA2DC-E)
While now the flights may not physically need to stop, before they would.
Say a flight goes from India to the UK on British Airways. Endpoint in London.
If the plane needs fuel in Romania and stops, how is that any different than running a flight from Romania to London?
Or if a British flight from Berlin, to London, goes to New York, it technically is two segments that both have end points in London.
Instead of running 2 separate flights, if the plane is already heading that direction then the route can just have an end point in the destination country.
Freedom 5 and 6 of the international agreements of air travel outline the ability to do this as long as the route starts or ends in the home country.
They aren’t “stealing” passengers from the host country because the country doesn’t own those passengers.
In theory a country could refuse to let airlines from other countries land there but it would likely mean that those countries would do the same in reverse. So the original country would have a monopoly on air travel but nowhere to go.
Additionally fewer countries these days have government owned airlines, so the airline is merely another private business. As long as the country gets whatever fees and taxes it requires it doesn’t matter which airline is transporting the passengers in and out.
It’s called a ‘fifth freedom’ flight. There are different levels of freedoms with regards to passenger traffic, these agreements are made between each country. It can make for some odd rules.
Japanese airlines can’t carry passengers from USA to Guam transiting via Japan, but US based airlines can.
Today we are capable of running long haul flights on routes like the UK to Australia with only a couple of stops for refueling thanks to planes like the Airbus A380 and Boeing 777, but this hasn’t always been the case, with older flights requiring many more stops on the way.
As such, limiting flights to only the local airline would price to be a complete nightmare, needing multiple airlines to complete a single route that you would need to switch between. The alternative was for the airlines to make various agreements allowing a carriers plane to use a foreign airport as a stop on certain routes – paying for access to the airports facilities and fuel as appropriate.
This won’t mean British Airways will be allowed to operate short haul Asian flights out of Changi airport in Singapore for example, as the local flights will still typically be limited to the local carriers, but they will be able to use it as a stop on a longer route.
Latest Answers