Malaysia Airlines is planning to suspend its Kuala Lumpur-Brisbane route from March 27, 2023, as part of its ongoing business review.
"The last flight on this route will depart Brisbane to Kuala Lumpur on March 26, 2023, via MH134," the airline said in a statement.
The airline further added that the operations on non-stop flights between Kuala Lumpur to four other existing Australian destinations, namely Adelaide, Sydney, Perth, and Melbourne, will continue without change, providing up to 43 direct services a week between Australia and Malaysia.
According to the carrier, customers traveling to Brisbane can leverage its codeshare and oneworld partner, Qantas, and connect from Sydney and Melbourne to Brisbane after the suspension.
Captain Izham Ismail, group chief executive officer of Malaysia Airlines, said: “After a thorough business review, we have made a difficult decision to suspend our operations in Brisbane to ensure we operate and utilise our fleet at an optimum level, as well as maximising revenue on every route we fly to, while facing strong headwinds from the continued increase in fuel cost, forex and interest rate.”
The airline predicts strong demand up to and beyond the first quarter of 2023, with forward bookings significantly ahead of the same period in 2019.
"We remain focused on ramping up our network to achieve full recovery by 2024. To date, we have deployed capacities at 76% year-to-date and anticipate ending the year with 82% capacity of pre-pandemic level network-wide but Australia has rebounded quicker and excluding the suspension of Brisbane, Malaysia Airlines’ Australia network will be at 98% capacity of pre-pandemic levels by March 2023,” Ismail added.
This year, the airline added new destinations from Kuala Lumpur to Doha, Haneda and Yogyakarta as well as from Kota Kinabalu to Singapore.