Normal fare for special Japan flight – SriLankan

With reference to the story titled Japan returnees want more relief from SriLankan in Daily FT of 21 March, the airline wishes to make some clarifications.

In the aftermath of the recent earth quake that hit Japan and the subsequent events that followed, SriLankan Airlines responded immediately to make special arrangements to bring in Sri Lankans resident in Japan as soon as possible on a direct flight back to Sri Lanka.

Although this flight was in addition to the Airline’s scheduled flights to Tokyo, the airline did not increase its fares on this flight from Japan as alleged by a traveller and quoted in your story. All fares charged on this flight were at the prevailing market price levels to Japan and the airline has not changed its fares to Japan in the recent past.

In fact the airline had to incur additional costs in sending an unscheduled aircraft empty from Colombo to bring in passengers from Tokyo. The additional flight also meant rescheduling and repositioning of crew in bases out of Japan, and cancellation of other flights to accommodate the additional service to Japan.