Per FlightGlobal: http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/iata-srilankan-airlines-to-join-oneworld-372814/
With Malaysian and now Sri Lankan, OW becomes pretty strong in SE Asia. Particularly good news for pax seeking to go to MLE.
Good for MLE and CMB, but not a whole lot of value in SE Asia proper from UL. South Asia and India, perhaps, but not a lot in SE Asia. It will be useful for getting from SE Asia into India and, assuming award inventory doesn't suck, there are some fun connections over CMB or MLE.
Useful from SE Asia, but not valuable to SE Asia? Indeed, there are only a few sea cities served. I was surprised (but upon reflection, shouldn't have been) at their depth of service into KSA.
I agree, this should support a lot of MLE traffic. Many colleagues over time have enjoyed good experiences in Colombo. This is great news for bird watchers. http://www.lanka.com/sri-lanka/bird-watching-in-sri-lanka-95.html
Personally I found the suggestion that CX would add direct service to CMB as a result just as interesting as SriLankan. That would mean one stop service from all their US gateways and my guess given the distance of Hkg-CMB they'd use a340s with international J class. For sure that is still most interesting for the MLE brigade like me but a big plus none the less. Though as ever AA and their crappy rules on partner awards would mean USA-Hkg-CMB will be two awards.
USA-HKG-CMB is a single award currently. Sri Lanka is in Asia 2, same as HKG. So despite AA's other odd rules that can be quite annoying, they actually work in your favor if you want to use CX for US-CMB.
I think Indonesia still counts as SEA, and MH is very strong there, allowing lots of nice tourist destinations. It is true that they've not a plethora of destinations in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but no single carrier seems to do all those. Air Vietnam does probably come closest.
Ooh good catch thank you. In that case that could become the new best way to get to MLE from USA. It's the long way round, but the fare restrictions make Etihad a PIA and expensive way of getting there the short way. Assuming they do actually add it and it's in a nice config. Though at just under 2500 miles I guess regional would not be the end of the world either
