The Cathay Pacific group has announced the renaming of Cathay Pacific’s wholly owned sister airline Dragonair as Cathay Dragon, adding that the rebranded airline will also be wearing new livery.
The two will remain as separate airlines, operating under their own licenses, said the company in a statement.
“By more closely aligning the two brands, this rebranding will capitalize on Cathay Pacific’s high international brand recognition and leverage on Cathay Dragon’s unique connectivity into Mainland China—one of the world’s fastest-growing business and leisure travel markets.”
Since Dragonair became a subsidiary of Cathay Pacific in 2006, it has added 23 new destinations and the number of passengers travelling across both carriers has grown five times to more than 7 million in 2015. The combined annual passenger number of the two airlines grew from 22 million to more than 34 million last year.
This strong growth has been made possible by the Cathay Pacific group’s efforts to channel international passengers to and from mainland China, regional, and long-haul markets through Hong Kong International Airport.
Cathay Pacific’s chief executive Ivan Chu said: “This rebranding will sharpen our competitive edge by offering an attractive Cathay-led brand package that carries the assurance of a consistently high-quality customer experience.”
The rebranding will see a new livery created for Cathay Dragon that features a Cathay-style brushwing logo. This livery will appear for the first time on one of Cathay Dragon’s Airbus A330-300 aircraft in April and will be progressively introduced to the rest of the airline’s fleet.
