At Changi, final boarding call for the budget class

When Qantas announced the closure of Jetstar Asia, the reaction was swift but not exactly surprised. The news moved like a low-pressure system through the industry — inevitable, inconvenient, and perfectly in line with the quietly accumulating turbulence that has shadowed Southeast Asia’s aviation sector since the world lurched back to life post-pandemic. Jetstar Asia, with its garish livery and crowded cabins, had always embodied a certain democratic promise: a budget airline with the audacity to carve out a slice of Changi’s global prestige, offering affordable mobility for students, contract workers, and the occasional wide-eyed family bound for their first trip beyond the causeway.

Its exit, scheduled for July 2025, lands with a thud that is both muted and seismic — muted, because this was a long time coming; seismic, because it makes explicit a reality many have quietly suspected: the days when budget carriers could survive, let alone thrive, in the high-gloss precincts of Singapore’s national infrastructure are drawing to a close.

The post-mortem is predictably technocratic: Qantas blamed “double-digit rises in supplier costs, airport fees, and regulatory charges,” adding that Jetstar Asia’s losses were unsustainable. The numbers tell a story of attrition, not catastrophe: profitable only six times in twenty years, set to post a thirty-five million Australian dollar loss this year. 

Behind the official jargon of “fleet reallocation” and “market realities,” however, is the simpler truth that the price of running an airline in Singapore has finally overtaken the budget traveller’s willingness — or ability — to pay.

Yet, to understand why this matters requires looking beyond the balance sheets and into the machinery of exclusion that has been quietly calibrated over decades of infrastructure ambition. Jetstar Asia’s departure is not mere spreadsheet event — it is the visible consequence of a system that has choreographed its rewards and penalties with clinical precision.

The architecture of exclusion

Singapore has always worn its air hub status like a badge — an achievement hard-won through meticulous policy, relentless infrastructural investment, and an almost Calvinist faith in efficiency. The city’s planners speak in the language of global competitiveness and “next-generation” connectivity, where Terminal 5 is not just a building but a signal to the world that Singapore remains indispensable to the flows of people and capital. 

Yet beneath the polished glass and LED grandeur, each architectural decision carries weight far beyond its apparent function.

The mechanics of exclusion are rarely brazen. Instead, they’re couched in the neutral-sounding increments of airport fees, passenger levies, landing charges, and regulatory surcharges — all justified in the name of progress and security. CAAS and Changi Airport Group have made little secret of their intentions: operational charges will rise every year through at least 2030, bankrolling multi-billion dollar expansions like Terminal 5 and the ongoing retrofitting of Changi’s terminals. 

As of April 2025, air travellers departing from Changi Airport have begun paying higher airport-related fees, part of a multi-year escalation that will continue through to 2030. Origin/destination passengers now pay S$49.40 in Passenger Service and Security Fees (PSSF), up from the previous S$46.40, with further S$3 increases scheduled annually, bringing the fee to S$58.40 by 2030.

Transfer and transit passengers, previously paying S$6, have seen their PSSF jump to S$9 this year, with incremental hikes pushing that figure to S$18 by the end of the decade. The Aviation Levy remains at S$8 for now, but will rise to S$10 from April 2026.

Each increment, minor in isolation, accumulates into a structural headwind for budget operators — transforming what was once a gateway for all into an arena where only those equipped for rising costs can endure.

For a legacy airline cushioned by premium passengers and government largesse, these costs are manageable — simply folded into higher fares or absorbed by loyalty programme margins. For a budget carrier, however, the difference is existential. Margins disappear, network flexibility vanishes, and what began as a push for world-class infrastructure becomes, in effect, a culling of the weak.

But the exclusion operates on multiple levels. Jetstar Asia’s displacement to Terminal 4, physically and symbolically isolated from Changi’s main concourses, made its situation even more precarious. Unlike Scoot, whose integration with Singapore Airlines ensures it remains close to the seamless heart of the airport, Jetstar found itself marooned — forced to navigate slower connections and robbed of the economies that come from mainstream flow. 

This spatial hierarchy gestures towards a deeper, perhaps unspoken, assumption about who fits into Singapore’s vision of global connectivity. The gleaming corridors and butterfly gardens of Terminal 1 aren’t merely amenities — they frame an experience designed with a certain kind of traveller in mind, one comfortable with premium pricing and seamless service. 

Budget carriers and their passengers, meanwhile, are still accounted for — they appear in policy documents, are routed through alternate terminals, and remain part of the ecosystem — but they exist slightly out of frame, peripheral to the airport’s evolving identity as a polished, high-performance hub for global mobility.

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The choreography of winners and losers

When infrastructure evolves in the name of progress, someone is always left holding the bill, and someone else is always positioned to benefit. In Singapore’s new aviation era, the winners are those whose business models align with the hub’s meticulously curated vision of value: premium carriers, full-service alliances, and any operator whose margins can absorb annual cost escalations.

For Singapore Airlines and Scoot — entwined at the core of Changi’s terminal strategy — each new levy becomes less an existential threat than an opportunity to consolidate dominance. The rising costs that killed Jetstar Asia become, for the national carrier, a moat that protects market position. When compliance costs rise, the largest players spread them across more routes and revenue streams. When terminal access becomes expensive, established relationships provide leverage that newcomers lack.

The losers extend far beyond airline balance sheets. With every low-cost carrier exit, the spectrum of accessible travel contracts. Students, migrant workers, small business owners, and regional families — the archetypes once championed by budget airlines — navigate an increasingly stratified airscape where cheap seats are rare and seamless journeys are privileges rather than expectations. Each incremental cost increase reverberates beyond the terminal, thinning the flow of opportunity and shrinking horizons for those whose mobility is neither optional nor leisurely.

The mathematics are quietly brutal. A $50 surcharge means little to a business traveler on a $2,000 ticket but represents a significant barrier for a student stretching a $200 budget. The cumulative effect of dozens of such policy choices is a travel ecosystem that sorts passengers not just by destination, but by class, income, and familiarity with the rituals of premium mobility.

Yet it would be simplistic to blame only regulators or national carriers. Global aviation is, by nature, a contest of scale and resilience, intensified by pandemic pressures. The question is whether adaptation requires abandoning accessible travel altogether, or whether models can serve both premium expectations and democratic mobility. Singapore’s answer, increasingly, seems clear: each policy decision tilts the playing field toward those who can pay premium prices for premium experiences.

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The market that isn’t

By the time Jetstar Asia’s final flight pushes back from the gate, the myth of egalitarian access at Changi will have been quietly dismantled, replaced by a sharper calculus of who aviation in Singapore is designed to serve. The market, we are told, is the ultimate arbiter — efficient, unfeeling, rational. But this narrative obscures a more complicated truth: markets do not exist in a vacuum; they are shaped, nudged, and sometimes engineered by the very authorities who claim to serve only the greater good.

Each new surcharge, every terminal reallocation, and all the elegantly phrased press releases about “future-proofing” form the invisible architecture of market outcomes. When officials speak of “letting the market decide,” they describe a market whose parameters have been carefully circumscribed by regulatory choices favoring scale, stability, and premium service over accessibility and competition.

This transformation occurs just as global mobility becomes more important than ever for economic opportunity, education, and family connection. The world has never been more interconnected, but the cost of connection has never been higher for those without significant disposable income. Singapore’s aviation success increasingly serves a narrower slice of the global population — those for whom a $500 ticket is convenience rather than sacrifice.

For the privileged flyer, little changes. Changi remains a cathedral of global mobility, efficient and increasingly adorned with luxury and seamlessness. Yet for those on the outside each year’s incremental price hike chips away at the promise that the world is open to anyone with a dream and a passport.

What remains is silent retrenchment, an acceptance that the future belongs to those who can pay for the privilege of movement, while the rest recalibrate their ambitions or vanish into statistical obscurity.

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The stories we don’t tell

It is tempting to find solace in industry leaders’ polished optimism: that the market “shifts” but does not “shrink,” that infrastructure expansion benefits everyone eventually. But history shows that when accessibility is priced as luxury, the pool of beneficiaries narrows, and the stories of those left behind are written out of the narrative entirely.

The end of Jetstar Asia is not a system glitch but a glimpse into a future where travel is curated for the few, and the rest watch departure boards flicker with possibilities decided elsewhere. The young entrepreneur who might have launched a regional business, the academic who might have attended a conference, the family who might have maintained cross-border connections — their stories become invisible, not because they are unimportant, but because they are not counted in the metrics that matter to policymakers.

This is the deeper tragedy: Jetstar Asia’s closure at its core represents the loss of a certain kind of possibility. The airline industry has always been about more than transportation — it has been about democratizing access to the world, making mobility a right rather than privilege, and ensuring that economic background does not determine geographic destiny.

The question that remains is whether this trajectory is inevitable or represents a choice that can still be reconsidered. Singapore’s aviation success need not come at the cost of excluding everyone who cannot afford premium experiences. Other models exist — airports and airlines serving both high-end and budget travelers, regulatory frameworks balancing efficiency with accessibility.

Until that recognition emerges, the departure of carriers like Jetstar Asia will continue to be explained as market rationality rather than policy choice, and the narrowing of access will be celebrated as evidence of Singapore’s evolution into a premium destination rather than mourned as the abandonment of a more inclusive vision. The flights will continue to depart, the terminals will gleam, and the world will continue to shrink — but only for those who can afford the price of admission.