HONG KONG – Operations resumed at Hong Kong airport early Tuesday (Aug 13) morning, airport authorities said, but more than 200 flights have been cancelled after protests shut down the travel hub on Monday.
“We have resumed check-ins,” a spokesman for the airport told AFP. The flight status board at the departures hall showed several flights listed as “boarding soon” with new take-off times listed for others.
Despite the airport reopening, Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific said it has cancelled over 200 flights to and out of the airport on Tuesday, according to its website.
Cathay Pacific said it would only operate a limited number of flights for connecting passengers. Airport flight boards showed the likes of Emirates Airline and Virgin Australia had flights scheduled to depart on Tuesday. Passengers with luggage were being checked in for flights, and only a handful of the thousands of protesters who flooded into the airport a day earlier remained in the building.
A Singapore Airlines spokesman said that a total of 810 passengers and one infant were affected by the disruptions on Monday. All flights to and from Hong Kong were expected to operate as scheduled on Tuesday, he said. A check on Changi Airport Group website showed that six Hong Kong-bound flights had departed Singapore as of 8.40am on Tuesday morning.
Customers travelling to or from Hong Kong on August 12 to 18 can rebook their flight at no additional charge for Singapore-Hong Kong, Singapore-Macau or Singapore-Guangzhou sectors within 14 days of the original flight. Alternatively, they can obtain a 100 per cent refund on their booking via a Scoot travel voucher, the airline said.
“The way to handle last night was chaotic,” said Kate Flannery from Australia, who was travelling to Paris. “The airport authority didn’t deal with the situation. I felt like I was walking around and nobody gave us information.”
A Cathay customer officer at the airport, who declined to provide his name, said that nearly all of the airline’s flights were full.
“It is possible that the airport authority will cancel more flights as they need to control the air traffic movements at the Hong Kong International Airport,” he said.
