AirAsia X, the long haul, low fare affiliate of AirAsia, says it set a new sales record with its newly-launched flights to Seoul recently.

Offering all-in fares from as low as KRW 60,000 (from Seoul) and RM 99 (from Kuala Lumpur) for bookings from August 4-8, 2010, the airline portal saw over 80,000 seats snapped up, generating over RM20 million in sales during the period.

The performance surpassed popular introductory sales of London, Melbourne, and Taipei and has broken all records from AirAsia X previous new route launches.

The new Kuala Lumpur-Seoul route which will begin November 1, 2010 is AirAsia X's 11th destination after Australia, India, Taiwan, China and Europe.

Calling it "amazing", AirAsia X chief executive officer, Azran Osman-Rani (left) said, "We are heartened by this record-breaking result, and are thrilled to deliver a new surge in tourist arrivals into Malaysia with the confidence given to us by the Malaysian government who approved our application to fly to Seoul-Incheon International airport.

"It's remarkable that we are setting new records in less than a week after we announced our new destination to Seoul on August 2."

He said that like AirAsia, AirAsia X was blazing new trails and revolutionizing the way travel plans are made.

He expects the new Seoul service to deliver strong new passenger traffic similar to the significant growth rates it's seen on the Melbourne, Perth and London routes.

The three routes grew by 41%, 66% and 31% respectively in 2009.

He said there has also been strong growth in inbound tourist arrivals into Malaysia from Australia, China and UK, the second, third and fourth largest growth in tourist arrivals in 2009 after Singapore.

AirAsia X expects over 100,000 passengers' arrivals on its daily Seoul service in the first 12 months of operations. In 2009, Korean tourist arrivals into Malaysia were 227,312, a 15% decline compared to 2008."

The airline is working with Korea Tourism Organization as well as Tourism Malaysia to launch targeted retail campaigns as well as offer packages to travel agents.

The AirAsia website - www.airasia.com - registered more than 13 million hits in the first 24 hours of the campaign. "The success of the campaign is attributed to the power of our blog and social network platform with over 410,000 Facebook followers and more than 30,000 Twitter followers," said Azran.

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