United Arab Emirates (UAE) low-cost carrier, Air Arabia, has celebrated the tenth anniversary of its launch of scheduled air services to Qatar by boosting its route between Sharjah and Doha to a three times daily schedule. The budget airline began regular service to Doha on January 6, 2004 and says that during the past ten years it has enjoyed “good performance” on the route.

Initially offering up to five flights per week, Air Arabia introduced a daily operation on the route from May 2005 and then added a second rotation from March 2009, which itself went to a daily frequency from May 2011. Last year it offered more than 125,000 seats in each direction, with capacity up 6.3 per cent on the previous year.

Since its inception in 2003, Air Arabia has played an important role in improving intra-GCC connectivity to most major destinations in the Gulf. “As we continue to play a vital role in connecting the nations, we have ambitious plans to strengthen operations to all airports within the GCC, offering enormous choice for customers seeking to travel around the region, where air travel is the only viable mode of transport,” said Adel Ali, group chief executive officer, Air Arabia.

“We are delighted to celebrate the New Year by launching an additional flight to Doha, which has always been a key market for us. Having completed a decade long operations in this very exciting market is a key milestone for us, and it is ambition to further expand our services from Doha beyond Sharjah to connect Air Arabia’s other hubs,” he added.

The strengthening of the Qatar operation further cements Air Arabia’s position as one of the leading low-cost carrier to GCC markets. In 10 years of operations, Air Arabia’s network has expanded to serve over 15 destinations in the GCC from hubs in the UAE and Egypt, with further expansion also expected. The airline now operates 154 weekly flights within the Gulf.

Alongside increasing passenger demand, the additional third frequency on the Sharjah – Doha is thought to have been driven by new competition on the route. In March 2014, Qatar Airways will return to the Sharjah market, a destination it had served prior to Air Arabia’s entry to the Qatar market. The airline will launch its own twice daily link from March 1, 2014 using an Airbus A320.

Unlike Air Arabia’s point-to-point model, the airline anticipates a significant amount of connecting traffic on the flights, affording customers from Europe, Africa and the America’s with an increased availability of flights to the UAE, while passengers from Australia, Asia and the Indian subcontinent will have convenient connection times when transiting via Doha.

In the table below we look in greater detail at bi-directional O&D demand on the Sharjah – Doha route. Although numbers declined during the initial years of Air Arabia’s operation from almost 55,000 in 2005 to around 37,000 in 2008, the increased frequency of flights has stimulated demand and passenger numbers have risen over the subsequent four years, increasing by 7.4 per cent in 2012 to just under 75,000. According to estimates, the figure for 2013 is likely to once more exceed the 70,000 figure with annual traffic levels down 3.2 per cent across the first three quarters of the year, according to MIDT data.