SEPANG - Based on AirAsia's recent statement Malaysia Airports Should Present the All the Facts on KKIA, it was clear that the airline company has chosen to take our statement out of context. Their statement had said that we implied that the negative growth was the reason for AirAsia's move to Terminal 1 (T1) Kota Kinabalu International Airport (KKIA).
We would like to reiterate that our intention was to refute AirAsia's claim that they have been experiencing flat growth since the move to T1. Data has clearly shown that after the consolidation of operations, there was indeed substantial traffic growth at KKIA, as a whole, as well as for the AirAsia Group thereby contributing to a rise in tourism traffic for Sabah.
With regards, to the incentives pay out, while all other airlines have also enjoyed the same benefit, several incentive programmes as mentioned in our earlier statement were exclusive to AirAsia from the years 2002 to 2009. The exclusive incentive was mainly for domestic traffic to support the growth of unchartered low-cost travel then. Subsequently incentive programmes such as the Airlines Recovery Programme and Airlines Incentive Programmes 1, 11 & 111 were then made available to other airlines after 2009. AirAsia has been paid RM 376 million in incentives to date, which makes up 44% of the total amount of incentives paid to all airlines and making them the biggest beneficiary.