A Cathay Pacific plane. Photo: Dmitriy Pichugin via Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – Cathay Pacific, the flagship airline of Hong Kong, is set to launch an office in Israel as well as daily Tel Aviv-Hong Kong flights beginning in 2018.

“The company’s agenda is to allocate airliners to destinations for which we see strong demand, and it can therefore be assumed that we will also increase the frequency of the flights to daily,” said Cathay Pacific’s Israel manager, Jonathan Bailey, Globes reported.

Cathay Pacific’s first flight to Israel landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport in March. The airline currently offers around four to six weekly flights between Tel Aviv and Hong Kong, and uses the environmentally friendly 280-seat Airbus A350 planes on the route. Next year, the airline may introduce Airbus A350-1000 planes for the Israel route, increasing seating capacity by 10 percent, according to Globes.

“The [Israeli customer] segment that surprised us was business class, both in comparison with other countries and with the forecasts,” said Bailey. “Demand for business class was huge. The feeling is that the passengers, especially businessmen who fly a lot, appreciate what they get for their money.”