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Asia-Pacific aviation has a curious problem. The region carries enormous passenger volumes, fills aircraft at enviable rates, and sits at the centre of aviation’s long-term growth story, yet its international route map remains thinner than it was before the pandemic.

That contradiction sits at the heart of a new Dohop white paper, The Airline Connectivity Opportunity: Why the Asia-Pacific Region Is the Next Proving Ground for Connected Travel. Its argument is simple enough to fit on the back of a boarding pass: airlines need greater network reach, but many lack the aircraft, time, or appetite for the cost and complexity of conventional expansion.

That is where connected travel enters the conversation.

Rather than requiring two airlines to build a conventional codeshare or interline relationship, the model uses a technology layer to combine flights operated by separate carriers into a bookable journey, with defined arrangements around servicing, baggage and disruption. It sits somewhere between traditional interlining and the do-it-yourself self-connect journey, ideally keeping the flexibility of the latter without leaving passengers quite so alone when the wheels come off.

Demand is booming. Route maps aren’t

The numbers explain why Asia-Pacific is fertile ground for the idea.

IATA says Asia-Pacific airlines recorded the strongest international passenger growth of any region in 2025. International traffic rose 10.9 per cent year on year, capacity increased 10.2 per cent, and the international passenger load factor reached 84.4 per cent, also the highest among the regions. Asia-Pacific represented 34.5 per cent of global RPKs.

The long game looks equally substantial. IATA’s latest long-term demand outlook projects Asia-Pacific passenger traffic to grow at a compound annual rate of 3.8 per cent between 2024 and 2050, compared with 2.5 per cent for Europe and 2.8 per cent for North America.

Yet more passengers do not automatically mean more routes.

Deloitte, using OAG schedule data, found that Asia-Pacific ended 2025 with 228 fewer international airport pairs than in December 2019. The figure represents 1,017 international route losses offset by 789 new international routes, with intra-Asia-Pacific links accounting for 92 per cent of the contraction.

Southeast Asia alone lost 188 international airport pairs. Thailand was down 58 and Cambodia down 52. Indonesia, a country where an island or two rather inconveniently gets in the way of a train journey, lost 113 domestic routes and 20 international routes.

So the region has what airline planners might call a splendidly inconvenient combination: strong underlying demand, thinner network coverage and constrained fleet availability.

The aircraft shortage changes the maths

The fleet problem is no theoretical exercise.

IATA reported that the global aircraft backlog had reached 18,100 aircraft by May 2026, representing more than half the active fleet. Production is improving, but IATA says deliveries remain insufficient to eliminate the accumulated shortfall.

McKinsey has looked at the shortage differently. Allowing for airlines keeping older aircraft in service rather than retiring them, it estimates the effective global shortfall could be around 2,000 aircraft, with narrow-body jets accounting for roughly three-quarters of it.

For an airline executive eyeing an attractive unserved city pair, the time-honoured solution acquire another aircraft and launch the route is less straightforward than it sounds.

The aircraft may not be available. Financing may not stack up. Engines and components remain problematic. And, by the time the shiny new machine finally arrives, yesterday’s irresistible demand forecast may have developed a few wrinkles.

Dohop’s proposition is that airlines can instead extend their commercial network through other carriers without assigning their own aircraft to every market.

Low-cost carriers need reach, not just routes

For Asia-Pacific’s low-cost carriers, the logic becomes particularly interesting.

LCCs built much of the region’s pre-pandemic point-to-point connectivity, often opening secondary and tertiary city links that full-service carriers had little appetite to serve nonstop.

By 2025, Dohop’s paper says low-cost carriers accounted for 30 per cent of international seat capacity and 32 per cent of total Asia-Pacific seat capacity. In Southeast Asia, LCC penetration can reach substantially higher levels.

However, there is an obvious ceiling.

An airline flying to 60 destinations can normally sell those 60 destinations under its own network unless it builds partnerships. Add compatible inventory from several other carriers, and that same airline can potentially offer hundreds of journey combinations.

That looks wonderfully tidy on a PowerPoint slide.

Airports, immigration officers and baggage carousels are less obedient.

Borders, bags and broken connections

Asia-Pacific does not have Europe’s single aviation market or anything comparable to the Schengen system.

A passenger self-connecting through Bangkok, Manila or numerous other gateways may have to clear immigration, collect checked baggage, pass through customs, recheck the bag and then clear security again.

Each stage consumes time. Each adds risk. And anyone who has watched an empty baggage carousel revolve while the connection clock counts down will know that theoretical minimum connection times can suddenly acquire an alarming sense of humour.

The Dohop report argues that more structured connection handling, including defined baggage arrangements and organised disruption recovery support, can reduce these weaknesses.

Importantly, passengers have already shown strong interest in building their own connections.

OAG estimated self-connecting passenger numbers increased from 55 million in 2016 to 179 million in 2022.

The commercial challenge is therefore not necessarily persuading passengers to combine unrelated airlines. Millions already do.

It is giving travellers a better way to do it and giving an airline an opportunity to retain the customer, booking relationship, and revenue rather than watching that traveller disappear into somebody else’s booking engine.

Asia-Pacific’s first movers are already flying

This is not merely an aviation futurist’s thought experiment.

Several Asia-Pacific carriers are already using the model.

Citilink launched its Dohop-powered Go Beyond platform in September 2025 with Scoot and Air India Express. The system opened 86 origin-and-destination pairs and added 47 destinations to Citilink’s reach.

That is a fair expansion of the shop window without having to order 47 aeroplanes.

Scoot, Singapore Airlines’ low-cost subsidiary, launched its Dohop-powered platform that same month with easyJet and Citilink as initial partners. At launch, customers gained access to more than 30 additional destinations across Europe and Indonesia.

The platform has subsequently expanded. Scoot Chief Commercial Officer Calvin Chan told TTG Asia that it “allows customers to book flights from Singapore to over 80 additional destinations across the globe.”

The quote matters because it demonstrates the multiplication effect. Network reach can grow without a corresponding multiplication of aircraft.

Thai Vietjet offers another example. Dohop’s paper points to its connection with Norse Atlantic’s Oslo-Bangkok operation, giving Norse customers onward options to Phuket, Krabi and Chiang Mai while giving Thai Vietjet access to European long-haul demand that would be difficult to reach independently.

For travel advisors, one qualification matters.

Not all connected journeys are created equal.

Advisors still need to know who assumes responsibility when the first flight is delayed; whether checked bags are transferred or must be reclaimed; what minimum connection time applies; whether travellers must formally enter the transit country; and exactly what protection accompanies the booking.

That is where the difference between a structured connected itinerary and a traveller simply buying two unrelated tickets becomes rather more than aviation terminology.

Airports can sell a network, not merely a runway

Airports have plenty riding on this, too.

The white paper argues that secondary airports can use connected networks as a route-development tool. Instead of relying largely on landing-fee discounts, marketing support or incentives to persuade an airline to open a route, an airport with participating connected carriers can potentially offer something more valuable: onward network reach from the first day of operation.

Europe provides an established example.

easyJet’s connection products, enabled by Dohop technology, have allowed passengers to combine easyJet services with selected partner airlines. easyJet currently describes options including one-stop booking, partner-airline self-connections and disruption protection, although baggage handling and transfer arrangements differ between airports and itineraries.

For an Asia-Pacific airport courting a new carrier, the sales pitch consequently changes.

It can offer a rebate.

Or, potentially, it can offer a network.

Dohop’s paper, drawing on Deloitte data, points out that substantial connecting traffic from Asian markets already travels through third-country hubs. For Southeast Asia-Europe journeys, Doha, Dubai and Singapore capture significant portions of connecting demand; other major hubs perform a similar role across Northeast Asian flows.

Those passengers are already travelling. The contest is over who owns the connection.

Modern retailing meets modern connectivity

None of this means conventional interlining is about to be pushed into the aviation museum alongside paper tickets, smoking sections and meals served with metal carving knives.

Traditional interline relationships still move enormous volumes.

IATA says its Clearing House processed US$63.75 billion in billing transactions during 2024. That rather firmly confirms there is still life in the old machinery.

For many full-service airlines, traditional partnerships remain essential, especially when through-baggage, schedule coordination, corporate contracting, alliance benefits and loyalty integration are involved.

But retailing technology is changing around them.

An IATA-BCG survey of more than 150 airline representatives found 81 per cent of respondents had live New Distribution Capability channels, with some airlines already achieving NDC penetration above 50 per cent of indirect bookings.

The broader move towards Offers and Orders seeks to move airlines away from fragmented legacy records and inflexible filed products towards airline-controlled offers and, ultimately, a single order.

Connected travel fits neatly into that philosophy. It lets an airline present selected multi-carrier combinations within its retail environment without necessarily recreating every bilateral process associated with traditional interlining.

Connected does not mean effortless

Nevertheless, no magic wand hides in the server room.

Regulation across Asia-Pacific remains fragmented. Visa requirements can turn a theoretically elegant itinerary into an impractical one. Baggage transfer requires airport infrastructure, ground-handling coordination and agreed procedures.

Disruption management needs somebody clearly responsible when things go wrong.

Consumer protection differs between jurisdictions.

And passengers ultimately care less about clever airline architecture than whether the price is right, the connection works and their suitcase arrives roughly when they do.

There is another reason for caution. Asia-Pacific’s powerful long-term growth outlook should not be mistaken for a perfectly straight ascent.

IATA’s 2026 monthly figures have been volatile amid Middle East disruption, fuel pressures and changing capacity deployment. In July, Asia-Pacific airlines recorded a 0.7 per cent year-on-year decline in international demand, even while passenger traffic between Europe and Asia rose 12.1 per cent.

Different corridors are moving at markedly different speeds.

Rather than weakening the case for flexible connectivity, that uncertainty may strengthen it.

Why connected travel matters now

The most valuable airline network of the next decade may not simply be the one boasting the largest fleet or the greatest number of coloured lines across a route map.

It may be the network that can add, test, rearrange, and withdraw commercially sensible connections faster than its competitors.

For Asia-Pacific airlines, connected travel offers a way to test markets before allocating scarce aircraft.

For low-cost carriers, it promises broader geographic reach without necessarily abandoning the lean operating economics the model was built on.

For airports, it creates another weapon in the route-development armoury.

And for passengers, provided the operational safeguards genuinely work, it can turn two unrelated flights into something much closer to one supported journey.

There is an important editorial qualification. Dohop has a commercial interest in the connected-travel model it advocates. Its white paper should therefore be read as an industry argument from a technology provider, rather than as an independent verdict.

Yet the report’s underlying pressures are not merely Dohop’s view. Strong long-term Asia-Pacific demand, reduced international route density, aircraft-supply constraints and rapidly growing self-connection are all supported by independent research from IATA, Deloitte, OAG and McKinsey.

That is why this argument deserves attention.

Asia-Pacific aviation has no shortage of ambition.

It has a connectivity puzzle.

The next chapter may therefore be written not simply by ordering another aircraft or adding another nonstop route, but by making the flights already in the sky work together more intelligently.

In an industry where getting a newly ordered aircraft can take years, squeezing more network out of the aircraft already flying is not merely clever.

It may prove the shortest route to growth.

To download the complete whitepaper, visit Download the whitepaper→.