Scoot steps up fight of the low-cost carriers Scoot will be flying five times a week between Singapore and Perth from December 19. Picture: Mike Batterham. AUSTRALIAN leisure travellers are set to benefit from an escalating battle between long-haul, low-cost airlines as an explosion in capacity on international routes promises to further reshape the market. Singapore Airlines offshoot Scoot this week became the latest long-haul budget airline to boost its presence here with the announcement of five-times weekly Boeing 777-200 services between Singapore and Perth from December 19. Kuala Lumpur's AirAsia X is also in the process of seriously building its presence on Australian routes and Jetstar International is muscling up with its new fuel-efficient Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners. The twin-aisle operators differ from their single-aisle counterparts in that they fly longer routes and offer two classes of travel with the ability, for a price, to escape the cattle-class squeeze. All three currently servicing Australia offer onward connections to other parts of Asia. The Scoot decision means it now has three beachheads in Australia - Perth, the Gold Coast and Sydney - giving it more than 6800 seats a week. It is part of a multi-pronged strategy by Singapore Airlines complementing its mainline services and comes as the low-cost carrier prepares for its next growth phase as it awaits the delivery late next year of the first of 20 787s. The Perth announcement prompted rival AirAsia X to remind West Australians that it was boosting its nine-times weekly Perth services to double-daily flights from November 25. It is also increasing Melbourne-Kuala Lumpur and Sydney-Kuala Lumpur frequencies to double-daily from November 25, will start flying into Adelaide four times a week from October 31 and return to a daily service to the Gold Coast on November 24. AirAsia X chief executive Azran Osman-Rani wants to double the airline's capacity to Australia and points to CAPA Centre for Aviation estimates that AirAsia X will become the nation's fourth-biggest foreign carrier from December, overtaking Malaysia Airlines, Thai Airways and Cathay Pacific. "We believe international travel should be affordable for everyone," Mr Osman-Rani said this week. Australians have successfully adopted low-cost, long-haul travel and the people of Perth have thrown their support behind AirAsia X and low fares from our first flight there in 2008. Official government statistics do not yet reflect the announced increases but show that the low-cost carriers in July accounted for a solid 14.2 per cent of the market into and out of Australia. CAPA chief operating officer Derek Sadubin said a combination of factors was making Australia an attractive target for long-haul, low-cost carriers. He said Australia was not a cheap destination and it was also a difficult place for traditional airlines to make work economically. He said the long-haul, low-cost carriers from Southeast Asia had capitalised on the outbound demand from Australia spurred on by the high Australian dollar and were also encouraged by the nation's liberal approach to air services policy. "I think also the airports and the tourism bodies have become quite aggressive in the space and they're offering some quite attractive incentives for the airlines to consider Australia," he said. And I think that the low-cost carriers also look at Australia as being a fairly plum market, albeit with long sectors, but the economy has been a bit of a beacon in a pretty dark world. So I think these are driving the expansion of capacity. He predicted that low-cost carriers would reshape the Australian market and make it "a whole lot more affordable" for people to get up to Southeast Asian hubs and use low-cost carriers for onward journeys in Asia. "And that's a big challenge for Qantas in terms of its Asian strategy and how they can compete with that, and I think that's the next (challenge)," he said. There was one cloud on the horizon in terms of fuel costs, although Mr Sadubin noted the low-cost carriers were addressing that with more efficient planes. "We've had fairly stable fuel prices but if it starts to creep up again I think that business model will be struggling and all airlines will be suffering," he said.