The OnBoard Courier for Thailand

After it come Bangkok (DMK) with 61 destinations and about 218.3 departures a day, Phuket (HKT) with 49 destinations and about 131 departures a day, Chiangmai (CNX) with 29 destinations and about 87.6 departures a day, Na Thon (Ko Samui Island) (USM) with 4 destinations and about 32.1 departures a day and Krabi (KBV) with 6 destinations and about 20.3 departures a day. Those are the alternates. When the primary gateway is shut by weather, a strike or a curfew, they are what a courier is rebooked through. Between them the 6 airports in Thailand that publish departures schedule about 1,021.1 movements a day and reach 287 separate destinations, counting each city once per airport.

Reach matters more than frequency for a hand carry, because a courier flies whatever is leaving. From BKK alone, 1,405 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 138 served nonstop. That is a normal spread for a well connected gateway, and it means a routing exists for most requests without waiting for a specific weekly service. It is computed from the scheduled network rather than from a booking engine.

42 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 15 domestic destinations. That matters on a hand carry because it decides whether the last leg can be flown or has to be driven. A consignee outside the gateway city is then a connecting flight, not a four hour drive.

Outside its own borders the country is tied most closely to China, about 114.4 flights a day, Vietnam, about 49.7 flights a day, India, about 47.1 flights a day, Malaysia, about 40.1 flights a day and Singapore, about 39.1 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Thailand without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Thailand to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

127 airlines fly out of Thailand in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to Thai Airways International on 61 routes, Thai AirAsia on 58 routes, Thai Lion Air on 34 routes, AeroVIP (Uruguay) on 31 routes and Bangkok Airways on 20 routes. The carrier matters to a hand carry more than it does to freight, because cabin baggage rules, what counts as an acceptable carry on item and whether an extra seat can be bought are set by the airline and not by the airport.

The longest single sector out of BKK in this data runs to Cincinnati, United States (CVG), 14,125 km by great circle. Great circle is not a flown distance and will read short against a real routing, but it is the honest way to state a reach: it says what one aircraft does without stopping, which is exactly the question a courier desk is asking.

From the Emirates, Thailand is reached nonstop. The network file records 4 such pairs: Dubai to Bangkok (BKK), about 5.9 a day on Emirates, Abu Dhabi to Phuket (HKT), about 4.7 a day on Etihad Airways, Dubai to Bangkok (DMK), about 2.3 a day on flydubai and Dubai to Krabi (KBV), about 0.7 a day on flydubai. More than one nonstop pair means more than one chance to travel on the day the consignment is ready, which is worth more on this kind of work than any single fast flight.

The carriers on those sectors are Emirates, Etihad Airways and flydubai. With this few, the desk knows all of their cabin rules by heart, which is the difference between quoting in fifteen minutes and quoting after a phone call.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 10 city pages, 2 standalone city pages, 6 Atlas entries, 5 lane pages and 8 trade and history pages for Thailand, and every one of them is linked from this page. That is the point of a country index: the material exists, it was written one page at a time, and until now there was no single place that connected it.

Alongside the reference material there is the country desk page, the travel and connections page and the courier recruitment page for people who already fly this market. The country page sells, the city pages answer, and the lane pages price. They are kept apart because a reader arrives at exactly one of those three questions and merging them would bury the other two.