SriLankan Airlines will operate three additional weekly flights to Melbourne from 15 November, taking the route to 10 flights a week and its total Australian services to 14, the Daily Mirror reported.
The extra services will run on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, alongside the airline’s existing daily Melbourne service.
The schedule
Under the revised timetable, flight UL608 departs Colombo at 2.15 p.m. and arrives in Melbourne at 5.40 a.m. the following day. The return, UL609, leaves Melbourne at 7.10 a.m. and reaches Colombo at 12.10 p.m.
The existing daily service continues unchanged: UL604 departs Colombo at 12.35 a.m. and arrives in Melbourne at 4.00 p.m., with UL605 leaving Melbourne at 5.30 p.m. and arriving in Colombo at 10.30 p.m.
In a statement, the national carrier said the expansion responds to growing travel demand between Sri Lanka and Australia. It described Australia as one of Sri Lanka’s fastest-growing inbound tourism markets, driven by leisure travellers and by the Sri Lankan diaspora.
Reading the two figures
The filing carries two different numbers that are consistent with each other rather than in conflict. Seven existing weekly Melbourne flights plus three additions give the 10 weekly Melbourne services in the headline, while the 14 weekly flights to Australia is the airline’s total across the country.
The report does not say where the remaining four Australian services operate, name the other destination, or give that route’s schedule.
What the filing does not establish
The item carries no reporter byline and is attributed to an airline statement, so the figures and the rationale are the carrier’s own. It gives no aircraft type for the new rotations, no fare information, no load factors or passenger numbers for the existing Melbourne service, and no indication of whether the additional flights are seasonal or permanent.
It also carries no comment from Sri Lankan aviation or tourism authorities, and no Australian arrivals data to support the description of Australia as a fast-growing inbound market. Ada Derana carried the same announcement but returns an access-denied page to this desk, and no other reachable verified newsroom had filed on it at the time of writing.