Thursday, Feb. 2, 2006 | 8:09 a.m.
Japan Airlines is likely to drop the only nonstop flights from Asia to Las Vegas, but local tourism officials intend to continue to aggressively market the city in Japan, the largest source of visitors from the Far East and the city's second-largest overseas market.
With JAL's board scheduled to meet next week to consider paring some international routes as a cost-cutting measure, a McCarran International Airport official said the Las Vegas route that includes three weekly nonstop round trips from Tokyo "is definitely on the chopping block."
A spokeswoman for JAL said no decisions have been reached on the route, but "everything is under scrutiny" as the airline attempts to restore profitability on its international routes.
Experts say JAL will report about a $400 million loss for the fiscal year.
Kyosuke Okada, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority's representative in Tokyo, said in an e-mail that while no official decision has been announced yet, JAL sales representatives have told travel wholesalers in Japan that the route would disappear by October.
Japanese media reports say JAL also is considering trimming flights between Osaka and Los Angeles and between Hiroshima and Seoul in addition to the Las Vegas route. The airline already has given up flights linking Fukuoka and Honolulu.
JAL's Las Vegas flights were about 73 percent full in 2004. Spokeswoman Carol Anderson of JAL's Southern California office said the percentage dropped slightly in 2005, but because the airline used a larger aircraft, the volume of passengers stayed constant.
Harry Kassap, McCarran's manager of air service development, said JAL has not been performing as well as its management had hoped since absorbing Japan Air Systems, a domestic carrier, last year.
Kassap said with fuel prices continuing to soar, the cost of operating a four-engine Boeing 747 on the route makes it difficult to maintain profitability. Okada added that JAL has had difficulty selling the more expensive business class seats on the Las Vegas route, because most passengers are bargain-hunting leisure travelers.
JAL has lost some loyal customers because of "a string of safety mishaps involving maintenance crews and flight attendants," Okada said.
"It's a disappointment for Las Vegas, but this is a route that is more attuned to something like a (Boeing) 777 or, someday, a 787," Kassap said.
The 777 does not have as many seats and, with only two engines, is more economical to operate. The airline has 21 777s in its fleet.
Although Kassap and the LVCVA's Terry Jicinsky are aware of the JAL board's pending decision, neither is ready to write off Japan's largest airline just yet.
Jicinsky said the LVCVA would continue to market Las Vegas in Japan and encourage visitors to use flights that stop in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., Seattle or Vancouver, British Columbia, if JAL abandons the Las Vegas route.
Although Jicinsky said there is no statistical evidence to indicate that tourists are more willing to travel to a destination when it is served with a nonstop flight, he added that wholesale tour operators say demand climbs when there is nonstop service.
The U.S. Department of Commerce reported that in 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 217,000 people visited Las Vegas from Japan, a 29 percent increase over 2003. Only the United Kingdom sent more visitors here.
For the two years preceding 2003, tourism from Japan was dented by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the outbreak of SARS and the Japanese people's reluctance to travel to the United States after it went to war in Iraq.
A spokesman for the Las Vegas office of the Japan Travel Bureau said he could not comment on how losing the flight might affect local tourism.
Kassap said because a final decision has not been reached by JAL, he is reluctant to begin approaching alternative airlines about taking over the route. Among the possible candidates: JAL rival All-Nippon Airlines, which currently flies between Los Angeles and Tokyo and which uses the Boeing 777 on most of its trans-Pacific routes.
"There are a number of carriers in Asia that have the capability of flying the route," Kassap said. "JAL has been a wonderful partner and I think everyone agrees that Tokyo-Las Vegas is a very viable market."
Okada is not as optimistic about All-Nippon, saying the carrier has allocated a number of its international resources to the China market.
Nonstop flights between Tokyo and Las Vegas began in June 1998 on Northwest Airlines, the city's first overseas route.
JAL entered the market in October of that year and Northwest left it in April 2001. JAL suspended flights in the months following 9/11 and eventually settled on three round trips per week.
Richard N. Velotta can be reached at 259-4061 or at velotta@ lasvegassun.com.
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