SEATTLE — Taiwanese start-up Starlux Airlines officially added Seattle to its network, its third North American destination, on Aug. 16. The new route to the Pacific Northwest also officially launched a strategic partnership with Seattle-based Alaska Airlines, a move Starlux hopes will be key to its success in the U.S.
The route is currently operated three times a week, but there are plans to expand the service to daily in early 2025. The service will be operated with a wide-body Airbus A350-900 jet with four cabins, which can accommodate four passengers in First Class, 26 in Business Class, 36 in Premium Economy and 240 in Economy Class.
For those unfamiliar with Starlux, it is a relatively new airline based in Taipei. It is the brainchild of former EVA Air Chairman Chang Kuo-wei, who founded Starlux after an internal power struggle at EVA forced him to leave the company.
Starlux launched in January 2020 to great acclaim and then, like the rest of the world, immediately went on hiatus as Covid spread across the globe. Little by little, the airline rebuilt its nascent short- and medium-haul network with a variety of flights within East Asia. Due to Covid and delays in aircraft delivery, the first long-haul service arrived in April 2023, to Los Angeles. San Francisco followed a few months later.
The airline describes itself as a luxury boutique airline that wants to become the “Emirate of Asia”. And it is fully committed to this goal. A brand new cadre of short- and long-haul airlines forms the core of the fleet. The airline’s stunning interiors were designed by BMW Designworks. The cabins are packed with the latest PaxEx technology.
Starlux has also developed internal collaborations with major brands such as the Peanuts and the LA Clippers and even has its own fragrance, a pleasant blend of wood, leather, iris and vanilla by Taiwanese perfumer P.Seven.
Still, it is a newcomer, at least in North America, and Seattle is a good example of the kind of headwinds a new entrant can face.
Starlux is the last of three airlines to offer service between Seattle and Taipei this year, having been preceded by Delta and China Airlines. All three join long-time route operator EVA Air, which has seen that market in particular grow from about 3,400 seats per week to over 7,000. And Starlux is not only new, it is also the only one of the four airlines that is not tied to an alliance.
The people at Starlux don’t seem to mind all that much.
Luxurious experience, reasonable prices
For one thing, fares have generally remained high – especially in premium cabins. You might think that competition and the airline’s relatively weak position would put pressure on it to lower prices. This tactic would not only fill seats but also increase awareness and visibility. But that is not the case.
True to its “luxury” claim, the airline has also maintained or even higher prices than China Airlines and EVA Air for all three destinations in North America.
Starlux delivers impressively high-quality PaxEx devices on board its wide-body aircraft. Image: Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren
This is no coincidence. Starlux representatives told CNN in an interview before the launch in December 2019 that all these amenities mean higher costs: “We offer exquisite services, so the fare will be a little higher than the other airlines.”
Conscious capacity decisions
Second, while some industry observers view the explosion of service to Seattle as an unsustainable oversupply of seats, Starlux disagrees.
“I think the capacity of this route is still quite low,” said Simon Liu, chief strategy officer at Starlux, in a recent interview with Runway Girl Network.
“We’re not just targeting traffic between Taipei and Seattle,” he said. “Look at the entire network in Southeast Asia and combine the population between Southeast Asia and North America. It’s huge.”
In fact, Starlux’s intra-Asia network, which began in earnest in 2021 after a Covid pause, is heavily focused on Southeast Asia. Japan is also well represented, rounding out the list of top destinations in Asia for Americans.
Codeshare benefits
Third, Seattle is not just about Seattle. It’s also about Alaska, and more specifically, Alaska Airlines. The codeshare is Starlux’s first and allows passengers on both airlines to book flights on both airlines through both websites.
“It helps us connect our passengers from Seattle to more than 100 cities across the U.S. and gives us great confidence in our operations in Seattle,” Liu told RGN.
Although he declined to give exact numbers, he said Alaska has been a big help in getting the new Seattle flights full, both in cash bookings and mileage redemptions. The first flight to Taipei was 99% full, and RGN’s flight on Starlux a few days later was similarly full.
Liu said that because of the partnership, Seattle already has more bookings for future flights than San Francisco and Los Angeles, both of which have been offering daily service for months.
It is currently unclear whether Starlux will officially join an alliance. Oneworld would certainly make sense, but Liu simply said that the airline is taking a close look at alliances.
As for Starlux’s next expansion destinations, Liu said there are more destinations in Southeast Asia in the pipeline, including Jakarta. Plans for North America are even more unclear, or at least Liu is keeping it a secret, if he knows.
“Everyone is talking about New York, and New York is on our radar. But we are also looking at many other destinations,” he said, before listing cities such as Chicago, Dallas, DC and Phoenix.
Many of these cities rely on the airline to get more aircraft, something Starlux, like many others, has struggled with recently.
“Overall, the status of aircraft deliveries at Boeing and Airbus is becoming increasingly difficult,” he said. “We are doing what we can and making our plan more flexible.” However, delays in expanding the network are inevitable, he said.
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Photo credit: Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren
