SriLankan Airlines will operate three additional weekly flights to Melbourne from 15 November, taking its Melbourne service to 10 flights a week and its total Australian operation to 14.
The additional flights will run on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, on top of the existing daily Melbourne service, the Daily Mirror reported on Friday afternoon.
In a statement, the national carrier said the expansion responds to growing travel demand between Sri Lanka and Australia. Australia has become one of Sri Lanka’s fastest-growing inbound tourism markets, driven by leisure travellers and the Sri Lankan diaspora.
The revised schedule
New flights (Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday)
- UL608 departs Colombo 2.15 p.m., arrives Melbourne 5.40 a.m. the following day
- UL609 departs Melbourne 7.10 a.m., arrives Colombo 12.10 p.m.
Existing daily service
- UL604 departs Colombo 12.35 a.m., arrives Melbourne 4.00 p.m.
- UL605 departs Melbourne 5.30 p.m., arrives Colombo 10.30 p.m.
One figure the filing does not close
The headline figure of 10 weekly Melbourne flights and the body’s figure of 14 weekly Australian flights are consistent with each other — seven daily Melbourne services plus three additions is 10, leaving four weekly flights elsewhere in Australia. But the filing does not identify those four flights or the city they serve, so the 14-flight total cannot be verified from this report alone. Readers should treat the Melbourne number as the firm one.
Context
The expansion comes a week after the airline’s management told Parliament’s finance committee it expects to return to profitability, and after it reported a first-quarter loss attributed largely to the West Asian crisis. The carrier has spent recent months trimming routes in the Gulf, suspending Riyadh and Dammam services from 1 November. Friday’s announcement is a rare addition of capacity against that pattern.
A note on sourcing
This report carries a single source. The Daily Mirror filing is attributed to “Administrator” rather than a reporter and reproduces an airline statement, which on this outlet is the usual marker of a submitted item rather than desk reporting. A sweep of the Hiru, NewsFirst, EconomyNext and Daily Mirror rails at the time of writing found no other verified newsroom carrying the announcement. The schedule details above are the airline’s own.
Not reported
The filing does not give the aircraft type, the seat capacity added, the fares, how long the additional frequencies will run, or whether they are seasonal. It gives no passenger numbers for the route and no figure for Australian arrivals to support the “fastest-growing market” claim.