The Chunqiu Airline Company, which is widely known for its low cost airfare, recently opened an air route from Tianjin to Shanghai. It further launched several discounted tickets at a low price of 199 yuan with fuel-related surcharge exempted.

In its flight from Tianjin to Shanghai, the company offered 20 tickets at the discounted price, which accounted for 10 per cent of the total tickets in sale.

Previously, another privately run airline company, Aokai Airline Company announced that due to policy issue and high cost, it gave up its low cost operation strategy after seven months of operation.

The Chunqiu Airline Company, however, said it would stick to its low cost principle.

Right now, it is still too early to tell whether such low cost airline companies could survive, as people in the industry said some of the cost involved was hard to break. From public's viewpoint, low cost airfare was no doubt beneficial to them.

(Chinanews.cn November 4, 2005)