Manama: Gulf Air, Bahrain's national carrier, yesterday said that it was launching flights to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, Basra in Iraq and Isfahan in Iran.
Samer Majali, Gulf Air Chief Executive Officer, said the new services to destinations — including previously announced Aden and Colombo — would be rolled out from September to coincide with the airline's winter schedule.
Gulf Air said it would begin services to Isfahan from October 30 with thrice-weekly services, while services to Aden via Sana'a and Colombo would start on October 31 five times a week. The Basra service would begin 31 October with three flights a week. Addis Ababa would be served from December 6, five times a week.
"The launching of these five new destinations demonstrates our new strategy to identify and serve niche and under-served markets and create potentially high-yield city pairs by providing direct service to Bahrain and beyond," said Majali.
Unexplored places
"While none of the Gulf carriers are serving Aden and Basra at present, cities like Addis Ababa and Isfahan are unexplored markets with Colombo being a popular tourist destination that has not been linked from Bahrain since 2002. We believe there is a strong commercial potential in all these cities and we hope these routes also will be successful like the other six routes that we recently launched," he said.
Gulf Air also launched its winter schedule at the press conference. "The new winter schedule reflects one of the main objectives of our new strategy - to serve every regional capital with at least a double-daily service and generate a new market of travellers who wish to conduct their business in the region and return home the same day," Majali said.
"Currently passengers can fly to the GCC destinations of Abu Dhabi, Dammam, Doha, Dubai, Kuwait and Muscat, conduct their business and return home the same day with a number of flight options. We have taken this concept further in our new winter schedule by offering three times a week same day return flights to Riyadh, Jeddah, Beirut, Cairo and two times a week same day return flights to Amman and Damascus in addition to the daily flights to these cities. The winter schedule will bring the number of flights in the region per week to 644 from last year's 528.
"Another core element of our new strategy is to strengthen our international network. As such we have made several improvements in our winter timetable; the frequency to and from Kathmandu have been increased from nine to 11 per week while new split timings have been introduced on Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok routes."
