Qatar Airways to Boost Flights to Milan

Posted 12/01/2012

Middle East carrier Qatar Airways is to increase its flights into Italy by adding an additional three weekly rotations between Doha and Milan Malpensa from this May.  The fast-expanding hub airline currently offers eleven flights per week, seven operated with widebodied A330 equipment (both -200 and -300 variants) and four rotations using an A320.  From May 1, 2012 this latter flight will be increased to a daily schedule, according to the carrier’s GDS inventory, meaning it will offer a twice daily schedule.

The Gulf airlines already have a strong presence in the Italian market.  Qatar Airways already flies double daily to Rome Fiumicino and daily to Venice from Doha; Emirates Airline also serves the same three markets from Dubai; Gulf Air has links from Bahrain to Milan and Rome, while Etihad Airways and Oman Air serve Milan from Abu Dhabi and Muscat, respectively.

An estimated 26,000 O&D passengers travelled between Milan Malpensa and Doha in the last year, but like most of Qatar Airways’ routes point-to-point traffic is supplement by a strong transfer demand (estimated at a lofty 84.3 per cent of the airline’s total traffic on this particular route). 

Italy is not the only European market that will see capacity increases from Qatar Airways during 2012 with an additional London Heathrow rotation also announced (although Manchester flights will reduce from double daily to ten a week during summer 2012) and more services anticipated to Spain.  The airline is expected to add to its existing weekly flights to both Barcelona and Madrid from the start of the Northern Winter 2012/2013 schedules at the end of October with four more weekly flights to Barcelona and three more rotations a week to Madrid. 

Qatar Airways has already revealed plans to launch services to nine new this year – namely, Baku (Azerbaijan), Tbilisi (Georgia), Helsinki (Finland), Zagreb (Croatia), Perth (Australia), Mombasa (Kenya), Zanzibar (Tanzania), Kigali (Rwanda), and Gassim (Saudi Arabia).  The cities of Baku and Tbilisi will be served on a combined daily service from February 1, 2012; Kigali will be a continuation of the airline’s new Doha – Entebbe route (launched in November 2011) and will be flown daily from March 21, 2012, while the route to Perth is due to commence on July 3, 2012 and will initially operate on a three times weekly basis.  Qatar Airways has already revealed plans to increase the Doha – Perth route to a daily schedule although this has now been deferred from October 29, 2012 until December 1, 2012. 

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PLEASE NOTE: From March 7, 2012 schedule data for all news stories has been extracted from OAG Schedules iNET; All GDS data is based on a live GDS update on the day of publication; Traffic data extracted from IATA BSP system for the year ending December 2011.  All information is subject to change.