Taking place on Sunday 15^th March 2015 and open to all attending delegates, The Routes Asia Strategy Summit will open Routes Asia in Kunming. The Strategy Summit will provide a valuable insight into aviation across the region as panels of leading industry experts take part in a number of moderator led discussions addressing key air service development issues affecting commercial aviation across the Asia-Pacific region.

Attendees of the Summit, which is sponsored by ATR - Avions de Transport, will hear keynote addresses from Xiuzhi Zhang, CEO of Spring Airlines and Xia Xinghua, Chairman of the China Civil Airports Association. Three moderator led panel sessions covering various aviation related subjects affecting the region will then take place.

Session one, entitled Airlines – Expansion of LCCs in China and North Asia will ask what challenges the markets of China and North Asia face as the expansion of LCCs continues to grow across the region. The discussion will also look at whether there will be any cross border joint ventures or whether there will be competition between national and overseas LCCs. This session will be moderated by Andrew Herdman, Director General, Association of Asia Pacific Airlines (AAPA) and will see participation from

Xiuzhi Zhang, CEO of Spring Airlines; Andrew Cowen, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong Express; Senthil Balan, Regional Group Head, Route & Fleet Planning of the AirAsia Group; Conrad Clifford, Regional Vice President for Asia-Pacific for IATA and Li Xiangdong, Deputy General Manager of China Eastern Yunnan Company

During the second session; Airports - Infrastructure – Capacity, Congestion, Construction – Can countries keep up with demand? The discussion will cover the hundreds of new airports which are being built in Asian nations to cope with the surging demand for air travel in the region. Over the next 10 years, more than 350 new airports in the Asia-Pacific are expected to be built with an investment cost of over US$100 billion and this session, moderated by David Stroud, managing Director of ASM will ask what are the main challenges, what lessons can be learned from across the globe and are the airports able to keep pace with demand from the airlines. The panel for this session will include Hou Wei, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Hainan Airlines; Vinoop Goel, Regional Head – Airport, Passenger, Cargo & Security – Asia-Pacific for IATA; Datuk Badlisham Ghazali, Managing Director of Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad and Mark Clarkson, Business Development Director – ASPAC for OAG.

The third session; Tourism – Capturing the China Market will look at how the rapid expansion of outbound tourism from the region and in particular from China. Questions such as which destinations will capture this market, how will they achieve this and what changes are we seeing to networks as a result of this expanding tourism market will be asked. Confirmed panellists for this final session of the day include Dean Wicks, Chief Flights Officer of Wego.com; Michael Burke, Assistant Director, Commercial for Hong Kong Airlines; Dr Adam Wu, Chief Operating Officer of the China Business Network; Nanshan Zhou, Senior Manager Business Development at Qunar and Mario Hardy, CEO of PATA who will moderate this discussion.

The programme will also include presentations from Bertrand Pabon, Marketing Strategy Director of Summit sponsor ATR - Avions de Transport and Conrad Clifford –Regional Vice President for Asia-Pacific, International Air Transport Association (IATA).

Routes Asia attracts the industry’s key decision makers and is the must attend event for all those interested in meeting with the industry's key players. The event, which is the annual gathering of air service decision makers for the entire Asia-Pacific region, is expected to attract over 100 airlines, 200 airports and 30 tourism authorities along with a number of other industry stakeholders to discuss air service development.

Keep reading the HUB for regular updates on the Routes Asia Strategy Summit and for more information and to register for Routes Asia 2015 click here.