Kolkata: Malindo Air on Wednesday inaugurated its flight operations between Kolkata and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.
The airline will run its flight five times in a week from the city offering a seat capacity of 810 seats.
According to a senior official of Malindo Air, the flight will take off from Kolkata Airport at around 12.05 am. The new flight operation offers 12 business class and 150 economy class seats.
Apart from the new service, the airline company also runs around 74 weekly flights from nine Indian cities including Trivandrum, Trichy, Kochin, Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai, Amritsar and Delhi.
The airline company started the flight from the city after it felt the growing need of the passengers.
It has been experiencing an increase in the number of passengers from this part of the country, Ramdas Shivram, General Manager (Sales and Business Development) of Malindo Air said. He also said the flight came here with full load from Kuala Lumpur and on return, there will be around 100 passengers from Kolkata.
The airline company already operates two flights a week from Bengaluru, three flights a week from Trivandrum, three flights a day from Trichy, 11 flights a week from Delhi and Kochin each.
It started its first flight operation in Delhi in 2013.
"India is one of the important markets for us and we have been getting good response. Kolkata is a potential market in terms of outbound travellers and we are looking for a good response from here," the airline CEO Chandran Rama Muthy said.
According to a senior official of Malaysia Tourism Promotion Board (North and East India), there was a 14.7 per cent growth of Indian tourist arrival to the Southeast Asian country during the January-June period of the
current year.
A senior official of the airline company said it is expected that the number of tourists to Malaysia from India would reach up to 1 billion by 2020.