Air China Okinawa-Beijing flights from Jan 11

Air China recently announced that it will be launching its flights to Okinawa from Beijing starting from January 11, 2012. The airline stated that a Boeing 737-800 aircraft will be deployed on the new Beijing-Okinawa route. The flight services will be operated twice weekly.

With the launch of the flights, Okinawa will become the 8th city in Japan served by Air China. The other seven cities include Tokyo, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Sapporo, Osaka, Fukuoka and Sendai. The introduction of new Okinawa flights will bring the total number of direct roundtrip flights to 260 between China and Japan.

Meanwhile, in yet another development Air China recently made self check-in available to its passengers at Tokyo Haneda Airport on September 21, 2011. The airline had earlier launched a pilot program of IATA “Easy Travel” in 2009. Besides Tokyo Haneda Airport, Air China had also made self check-in available at Tokyo Narita Airport, Frankfurt Airport and Hong Kong Airport outside Mainland China.

The self check-in is a user-friendly system featuring Chinese, Japanese and English. The passengers can use the system for their benefit, such as selecting their preferred seat, accruing Air China kilometers as well as printing boarding pass, and subsequently avoiding long queues at the check-in counters.