TEMPO.CO, Surabaya - Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific will hold a travel fair in Surabaya on October 23-26. "This is the first travel fair in Surabaya," said Rozanne Lee, East Indonesia Manager at Cathay Pacific yesterday.

The exhibition aims at gaining more passengers, Cathay is focusing more on three destinations: Jakarta, Surabaya and Denpasar. After 20 years of operation in Surabaya, Cathay’s load factor has reached more than 80 percent.

Passengers from Surabaya are generally businessmen and migrant workers from East Java and East Indonesia while the number of tourist passengers are still small. Cathay seeks to increase the number of tourist passengers by taking advantage of the year-end moment. Hong Kong has a lot of interesting events by the end of the year, Rozanne said.

In order to improve services, Cathay has bought 85 new Airbus and Boeing aircrafts worth HK$220 billion. Cathay has also renewed the cabin for HK$4.9 billion and has added more lounge in all international networks for HK$880 billion.

The travel fair also aims at celebrating Cathay’s achievement as the best airline by Skytrax World Airline for the fourth times based on the customer satisfaction survey from 160 nations and 245 airlines. Qatar Airways and Singapore Airlines took the second and the third position respectively while Garuda Indonesia is sitting on the seventh position.

ENDRI KURNIAWATI