KUALA LUMPUR, March 18 — Malaysia Airlines has scaled down its flight operations as part of the travel ban imposed following the implementation of the movement control order to combat the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Group chief executive officer Captain Izham Ismail said its overall network will be significantly reduced, citing international flights to India between March 17 to March 31, and the Philippines between March 21 to March 31.

"Prior to the order, Malaysia Airlines suspended services to Saudi Arabia, South Korea as well as Beijing, Daxing, and Kota Kinabalu to Shanghai, also due to border controls imposed and reduced capacity to Australia and New Zealand due to self-isolation policy of the two countries,” he said in a statement today

Izham said the situation has been rather fluid over the past two days, with the airline having to make last-minute cancellations to abide by the restrictions.

"The uncoordinated approach has posed great challenges to our operations, but we are doing our best to re-route passengers via reallocation onto other carriers. This is an added cost to our operations.

"We are also adjusting our low-load flights by cancelling and merging them to manage costs while managing our customer expectations. To date we have cancelled more than 4,000 flights,” he said.

Malaysia Airlines’ Global Contact Centre has been dealing with overwhelming calls, peaking at 25,000 daily and up to 2,000 emails daily in the past three weeks, for which Izham apologised to passengers anxious about their bookings.

"I assure them that we are not here to take advantage of the situation; in fact, we are one of the few airlines that have offered unlimited flexibility in travel date change and waiver of certain fees. It is just taking us a lot longer to process each request due to the volume of calls and emails.

"Changing bookings requires special expertise in the global booking system, therefore it takes time for us to redeploy staff to support our contact centre. Our ticket office in Nu Sentral is also closed from today following the nationwide closure of malls,” he said.

Izham encouraged passengers with bookings beyond the next 48 hours to initiate booking changes online via Malaysia Airlines’ Covid-19 waiver assistance form available on their website.

"Due to the significant capacity cut, Malaysia Airlines and all sister companies under the Malaysia Aviation Group’s back office operations have also been reduced alongside flight and airport operations.

"A majority of its workforce globally are working from home in line with various governments’ requirements to combat the spread of Covid-19. The Group ensures though that it continues to uphold the highest safety standards in its entire operations,” he said.

The order was announced by Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin on Monday night, and starts today until March 31. Malaysians will not be permitted to travel abroad during this time, and all foreign nationals or tourists will not be permitted to enter the country as well.

The order will affect all business premises as they will have to shut down, with supermarkets and grocery stores selling daily essentials being exempted. All government and private premises will also be closed during the movement control order, except for essential services such as utilities, telecommunications, transport, banking, health, pharmacies, ports, airports, cleaning and food supplies.

After some initial confusion, new rules under the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases (Measures Within the Infected Local Areas) Regulations 2020 have been gazetted, limiting movement to special purposes or essential activities such as buying food or seeking healthcare.

Those seeking to travel from one state to another within the two week period must obtain police permission before doing so.