Last year, ANA announced that it would be merging its two low-cost subsidiaries, Vanilla Air and Peach Aviation. Naturally, it decided to discontinue the lesser known Vanilla brand and keep the better-known Peach one.
Earlier today, Vanilla Air’s last scheduled flight landed, bringing the six year history of the airline to an end.
Vanilla Air Completes Its Integration Into Peach
The airline held “send-off” and “welcome” events at Tokyo Narita for flights JW103 to Taipei and JW106 from Taipei.
These flights, the latter of which landed at Tokyo Narita at 6:11PM, were Vanilla Air’s last flights to what used to be its base.
However, the actual last revenue flight of Vanilla Air was flight JW158 from Taipei to Fukuoka. The flight was operated by JA12VA, the A320 that operated flight JW103 earlier in the day, and landed in Fukuoka at 8:06PM.
Vanilla Air was born out of AirAsia Japan in 2013 after AirAsia exited its investment out of the joint-venture with ANA. The airline operated both domestic and international flights, mainly out of its Tokyo Narita base. It operated an all-Airbus A320 fleet.
AirAsia Japan was relaunched in 2017 as a partnership between AirAsia and a number of other Japanese companies including Rakuten.
Peach Aviation commenced operations in 2012 as the first Japanese “true” low-cost carrier. Originally starting with domestic flights, its network has grown to include destinations in South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Thailand.
Currently it operates an all-A320 fleet just like Vanilla Air did, however, it also has a pair of A321LRs on order. Peach plans to use those for further expansion into Southeast Asia.
Summary
Today marks the end of ANA operating two separate low-cost subsidiaries. While as an aviation enthusiast, I would have preferred for both of the airlines to stay around, from any other point of view it wouldn’t have made sense.
After all, the only reason that ANA found itself in the situation in the first place was AirAsia’s exit from its first joint-venture in Japan.
Discontinuing the Vanilla Air brand will allow ANA to focus its resources on growing Peach rather than having to juggle both of the airlines. This will hopefully lead to faster growth of Peach and more routes both within Japan as well as from Japan to the rest of Asia.
