Cool: British Airways Adds Kuala Lumpur To Melbourne Fifth Freedom Flights!

Curious - is this going to have the new BA hard product or the old skinny seats circa 2003

@ Mike -- By the time this launches, all 787-9s should have the new Club Suites, I expect.

the marginalization of the Middle East carriers is underway.

No matter how hard they try to frame it, having missiles land at DXB over and over again is bad for perception of the area.

Add in the the UK and Australia have logically very strong ties and this is an easy route to start even in good times and, as Ben notes, routing via KUL is an easy choice.

Yeah I’m with Tim. For the foreseeable future there will be demand for routes via Asia to Europe from Oz. A lot of capacity currently goes through the Middle East that will need a home.

50k AA miles and small taxes to fly in first class for 9 hours isn’t bad! I’ve done the Singapore Syd route a few times. On the old seat ugh.

You’d think this will struggle to pick up leisure travel on the MEL-KUL leg with MH, AirAsia and Batik Air all competing for the tourist dollar and TK/SQ/TR/JQ/QF all offering flights to SIN for competitive Asian connections.

They're also going to Gatwick from LGW. The one thing I was surprised with the war happening for the foreseeable future is that they haven't tried PKX, CAN or TFU since it's the first year of visa free travel for brits.

That's a bit of wishful thinking. Time will tell.

Commenter from Malaysia adjacent to the industry here. I'll be perfectly honest, from my own perspective. British Airways are doing far better than I had expected them to. Part of the factor as to why is because of Malaysia Airlines being effectively cramed from the front to back on their two daily services. Malaysia Airlines are consistently filling their London sectors; Paris is also flying at very, very healthy loads that I see as very much sustainable in time to come. Granted that a very portion of their traffic is connecting onwards through Kuala Lumpur rather than being O&D traffic in itself, its share is often overplayed especially on their London flights. There is a very significant diaspora of Malaysians in the UK and London is their only connection having axed Manchester some two decades ago and many choose to study in the UK too.

It's also interesting to note that Malaysia Airlines' operations to London only codeshares with Firefly (Still a subsidiary of Malaysia Airlines) and Singapore Airlines only, no mention of British Airways who is in itself a OneWorld partner in it. Parallel to this is the fact that British Airways' flights to Kuala Lumpur also operates with codeshares only with Iberia (IAG), and American Airlines. So in large parts, British Airways' traffic is rather organic and demand parallel to existing offerings would, to me at least, indicate room for the consideration for any additional opportunities to be pursued even if superficially it may seem more benign than ideal.

However, where British Airways and Malaysia Airlines do have codeshare agreements are Malaysia Airlines operating on domestic, regional international, and Oceania markets that notably, Malaysia Airlines would not directly be competing against British Airways with (ie: Perth, Adelaide, Melbroune, Auckland but not Sydney). So with this context, it very much provides a great depth of context as to why British Airways would begin to see Melbourne via Kuala Lumpur as possible given that their flights to Kuala Lumpur lands and sits idle for six hours before only departing back to London.

British Airways choosing KUL to connect onwards to an Australian destination is not a new phenomenon. Although it may only be the second carrier to do so, it is interesting to note that Turkish had opted to launch their Sydney route (without fifth freedom however) through Kuala Lumpur. Though that had started in 2025 when the traffic quota between Australia and Malaysia had widened significantly, it is important to note that 2026 was when the Australia-Malaysia Open Skies agreement were to go into effect.

Malaysia Airlines already operated five weekly services to Brisbane, daily to Adelaide, double daily to Perth, triple daily to Sydney and Melbourne, and 10 weekly to Auckland. About a third of the Malaysia-Oceania traffic only began operations in the last year, and Malaysia Airlines still seems to see room to expand especially given that in the FSC market, they would be the only operator with neither Qantas nor Air New Zealand having any non-stop O&D services with Kuala Lumpur itself. British Airways sticking itself into this route would effectively compete with one carrier, and in that case, it even already carries their codesharing traffic.

Of course I would nuance my own take here with the fact that my perspective may inherently be biased by proximity. But perhaps a cynical take would be one where Singapore may even be considered a more saturated market given they have on the order of half a dozen flights between Singapore and London alone in addition to more than a dozen more to Western Europe not to mention North America where Kuala Lumpur sees only KLM and British Airways as the only operators from Western Europe, the expected marginal yield potential seems to be greater where they already command by percentage a greater share than one as wildly competitive as say Bangkok or Singapore.

It would in fact be my personal take that Kuala Lumpur is one of those airports that has massive room for expansion and considering its days a decade or two ago where they had a network magnitudes more widespared than their current offerings. Cynics would be quick to point out that it was in fact an era filled with politically motivated service offerings and that financial viability may not have been the utmost priority. But to see it being a shell of what it once was in this day and age, you would get a sense that maybe it's worth considering once again.

On a more optimistic outlook, it's nice to see that Lufthansa had already announced a planned relaunch for non-stop services to Kuala Lumpur from Frankfurt on their B789 towards the end of this year.

I think there's much to look forward to even if it may be a slow burn over here. Notwithstanding extraordinary circumstances like Covid or conflicts beginning left, right and centre, Kuala Lumpur has a lot to offer not only from where it is located, but also that the airport sits on land that from when it was conceived, sized to allow for ample expansion. They just need to play their cards right and let time work the rest.

@Mike
Ben mentioned a 215 seater 787-9 with 38 business class seats. That is the new configuration with club suits. The old configuration has 216 seats with 42 in business class. By the end of this year all 787-9s will be reconfigured with new seats. This route will launch next year so we can be 100% sure the aircraft will have new seats.

I don't agree that this points to LHR-KUL currently struggling. The current rotation of this flight is ~13 hours each way plus ~6 hours on the ground in KL = ~32 hour rotation.

With the addition of the MEL tag on, the entire rotation goes up to ~50 hours. This necessarily means adding more plane resources onto the route. They wouldn't be adding precious resource to a route that is struggling.

I think the more correct way to think about this is that BA wants to fly to MEL. And with that, it HAS to make a stop somewhere. And out of the various options, KUL happens to make the most commercial & logistical sense.

I think a more interesting route additon would have been to AKL or CHC.
ANZ are looking at restarting London ops, so there's clearly some demand whilst plenty of other options to MEL.
Would get even better utilisation out of the frame too.

'[G]iven that Kuala Lumpur to Melbourne has some low fares, ... I can’t imagine people will pay a huge premium to fly British Airways.'

I'm not sure it's as clear as that. Certainly not a huge premium, but perhaps a small one. BA won't compete with some of the LCC fares on the route, but when I've searched SYD-SIN fares and CBR-SIN connections in Google and even Amex, flights using the BA Fifth Freedom flight haven't been uncompetitive. Not always, but often enough. This may or may not play out for MEL-KUL but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility.