Cambodia’s Secretariat of Civil Aviation has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Finland Civil Aviation Authority to open their skies and allow direct flights between the two countries.
Sin Sereyvutha, spokesman for Civil Aviation Secretarial General, told the Khmer Times that the MoU would pave the way for airline companies in both Cambodia and Finland to fly directly between Phnom Penh and Helsinki.
However, Sereyvutha said for the moment he did not expect passengers from Helsinki to fly directly to Cambodia on their national carrier Air Finland as the passenger load was still small, the Khmer Times reported on Thursday.
Because of this, he said, both countries would promote codeshare partnerships between airlines flying between Europe and Southeast Asia.
Codeshare is an aviation business arrangement where two or more airlines share the same flight.
Sereyvutha explained the reasons for the low passenger load on the Helsinki - Phnom Penh route.
“Finland has few Cambodians living there, while most Finns visit Bangkok as tourists rather than come to Cambodia,” he said.
“I think if we have more attractions, they will come to us. At the moment, we don’t know how many tourists from Finland visit Cambodia and we tend to put these arrivals in the ‘other’ category of our records, rather than have a specific section for Finland,” added Sereyvutha.
In May, Austrian Airlines announced that it had entered into a codeshare partnership with Bangkok Airways to fly passengers directly from Vienna to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in Cambodia and also to popular Thai destinations like Phuket, Krabi, Koh Samui and Chiang Mai.
On Tuesday, a new international route connected Phnom Penh and Siem Reap with China’s populous southern province of Hainan.
Luo Baoming, secretary of the Hainan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, unveiled the plan during a meeting with Prime Minister Hun Sen at the Peace Palace last week.
Baoming, however, did not reveal which Chinese airlines will operate the new Haikou City - Phnom Penh - Siem Reap route.
According to Cambodia’s State Secretariat for Civil Aviation, one weekly flight from Haikou City to Phnom Penh and two weekly flights to Siem Reap came into operation Tuesday.