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Flagship carrier Garuda Indonesia plans to expand its fleet, increase flight frequency and add new routes in order to tap the growing air travel market, executives said on Friday.

“The domestic and regional markets is very promising, with Asia and Indonesia particularly becoming the center of growth,” said Arief Wibowo, Garuda’s marketing and sales director.

New routes include Denpasar to Haneda, Japan in April and Jakarta to Taipei in May.

Garuda plans to boost its Jakarta-to-Kuala Lumpur flight frequency from two times a day to three times a day starting this Sunday and increase flight frequency on the Singapore route to eight times a day from seven.

Arief said that due to public demand, Garuda would start a Bandung-to-Surabaya route on Friday.

Arief said this year, Garuda would add 20 airplanes to its current fleet of 87 planes.

Pujobroto, Garuda vice president for corporate communications, said Garuda would look for loans up to $200 million to cover pre-delivery payment and security deposits of the 20 airplanes.

He said Garuda’s fleet would have 194 planes by 2015, including 25 Airbus 320 that would be operated by its subsidiary low-cost carrier Citilink and three air freighters.

Pujo said that the new planes will be equipped the latest technology in fuel efficiency thus helping the airliner to save costs in serving new international and domestic routes.

Garuda previously said it expected its number of passengers to increase 20 percent from the estimated 17 million last year.

Garuda’s 2011 unaudited net income was Rp 900 billion ($100 million), the company’s chief executive officer Emirsyah Satar said last month, without providing a comparative figure.

He also expected sales to rise 21 percent this year from last year’s unaudited total of Rp 27.1 trillion.

Investor Daily