DUBLIN, March 16 (Xinhua) -- Direct flights between Dublin and Beijing will be opened in June. Local communities here have hailed the good news, saying it will boost Ireland-China trade and relationship.
Irish Deputy Prime Minister Simon Coveney announced Thursday in Beijing that China's Hainan Airlines will open direct flights between Dublin and Beijing starting on June 12 this year with four non-stop flights and four flights with a stopover in Britain's city of Edinburgh each week.
The first-ever direct route to China is a major achievement which will prove transformational to China-Ireland ties, said the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in a press release posted on its website.
"This is a hugely significant announcement for the Irish economy," said Vincent Harrison, managing director of the Dublin airport. The new Dublin-Beijing route "links not just our two capital cities, but also our two countries," he said in a statement released on the airport's website.
Paul O Kane, chief communications officer of the Dublin airport, told Xinhua that direct Dublin-Beijing flights are expected to carry 100,000 passengers a year.
This, in addition to 120,000 passengers expected to be carried annually by Cathay Pacific's Dublin-Hong Kong direct flights which are also due in the coming June, will contribute significantly to bilateral trade, tourism and people-to-people exchanges, he said.
To facilitate Chinese visitors' trips to Ireland, the Dublin airport has recently launched a Wechat service in Chinese at the airport, said Paul.
Kane said the direct flight time between Dublin and Beijing will be around eleven and a half hours and the airline ticket price is yet to be decided and announced by Hainan Airlines.
Commenting on the impact of Dublin-Beijing direct flights on the Irish tourism, Niall Gibbons, CEO of Tourism Ireland, said in an email sent to Xinhua that the new flight "will be a major game-changer in growing visitor numbers from China."
According to Tourism Ireland, an organization responsible for marketing Ireland overseas as a tourist destination, approximately 70,000 Chinese visited the island of Ireland in 2017, up nearly 17 percent from some 60,000 in 2016.
Tourism Ireland does not know where exactly the Chinese visitors came from when asked to give a breakdown of the Chinese visitors to Ireland last year, however, it does know the potential of the Chinese market.
In a press release posted on its website last year, Tourism Ireland quoted the United Nations World Tourism Organization as saying that China is now the world's largest outbound travel market with more than 127 million Chinese people travelling overseas each year, spending over 292 billion U.S. dollars.
"China is an important emerging travel market and one that Tourism Ireland is committed to growing over the coming years," said Niamh Doherty, a press officer of Tourism Ireland.
She said Tourism Ireland will send in May its biggest ever sales mission to China where they will meet with top Chinese travel agents and tour operators in key Chinese cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
"Great news, surprising," said Wang Xinyu, a student from Beijing who is currently on a two-year study program at University College Cork, when commenting on the announcement of direct flights between Dublin and Beijing.
"In future, I don't have to have a stopover in Amsterdam or any other third airport for hours. I can directly fly back home," she said.
The opening of direct Dublin-Beijing route is not only good news for Wang and the 5,000-plus other Chinese students who are currently studying in Ireland, but also for people involved in bilateral trade and business.
There have been more and more business people travelling between China and Ireland as bilateral trade has witnessed rapid growth over the past few years, said Xue He, economic and commercial counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Ireland.
According to Xue, the trade volume between China and Ireland in 2017 hit a record of 11.05 billion U.S. dollars, up 37 percent over the previous year.
Currently, there are nearly 400 Irish companies in China while over 20 Chinese companies in Ireland, said Xue, adding that there is a big potential to be tapped for bilateral trade as the two economies are quite complementary to each other.
Xu Wei, chairman of the Association of Chinese Enterprises in Ireland, said that the number of members of his association has more than doubled to 14 from 6 when the association was founded in 2015.
He said the association includes big Chinese companies like ICBC, BOC and Huawei. He predicted that more and more Chinese companies will come to Ireland as the country's investment environment is favorable for businesses. He believed that direct Dublin-Beijing flights will definitely facilitate trips by businessmen from both sides.
