Canberrans are now able to fly direct to Indonesia for the first time, with flights between the capital and Bali starting today. But the boost in international options has not been smooth travelling for everyone.
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00:00Swapping beanies for board shorts.
00:05It's been negative degrees this week, negative degrees next week, so looking forward to the sun.
00:10I would love to be somewhere hot instead of being here where it's so cold.
00:14For the first time ever, Canberrans are able to fly direct to Indonesia.
00:19Good morning ladies and gentlemen, a Big Air flight ID6014 to Denpasar is now ready for boarding.
00:26It saves us the travel having to go to Sydney or catch to Melbourne, so it's like so many hours back in our day.
00:32Being a student here at ANU and Canberra, it's really convenient having a flight that can take me straight home.
00:39Batik Air taking off, becoming the second international service flying from the capital,
00:45after Fiji Airways began operating flights between Canberra and Nandi last year.
00:51New routes take a little while to get established and we've seen that with Fiji Airways.
00:56Their numbers are really good and they're continuing to grow and we'd expect a very similar sort of thing with Batik.
01:02While it was all smiles today, some passengers on future flights have expressed frustration after being given new travel dates.
01:11The airline putting it down to teething problems.
01:14Any new route, any new flight, there's a bit of tweaking here and there and we've had to unfortunately cancel two flights.
01:23Despite those issues, the airline says it is committed to running three weekly flights
01:28and are open to increase that number if there's enough demand.
01:32The success of any route is down to having passengers on those flights.
01:37There won't be many Indonesians coming from Bali to Canberra, it is a leisure route.
01:42The airport hopes to have seven international destinations within five years.