Gulf Air to close underperforming routes

Bahrain's national carrier Gulf Air is announcing the closure of its services to four destinations; Damascus, Athens, Milan and Kuala Lumpur. Services to Damascus will be stopped from 2 March while flights to Athens and Milan will be stopped from 12 March and Kuala Lumpur from 25 March 2012.

This follows the announcement of the closure of Entebbe and Geneva routes earlier this month.

The move comes as the airline seeks to address the economic challenges faced in recent times; in particular, the local and regional political situation, the high price of fuel and low passenger numbers.

The decision has been taken to allow the airline to use its fleet and resources in the most efficient way by concentrating on high-demand, high-yield routes to ensure that its core customer base is served effectively.

Gulf Air’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Samer Majali said: “It is currently a challenging business environment for airlines around the world. These closures are pragmatic commercial decisions aimed at focusing services on routes with higher passenger traffic. Our commercial strategy, developed in 2009, delivered significant gains in 2010 but last year has been challenging. Therefore, we are now adapting our approach to address the challenges on an urgent basis.”

Gulf Air realizes that this will be disappointing news to some of its customers and regrets the inconvenience this may cause.

Air Transport analyst Saj Ahmad said: "Gulf Air needs to reinvent itself if it wants to survive. Having state support won't help nor will dropping routes help if they can't keep customers and revenue either.

Its likely we'll see more Gulf Air routes being dropped or suspended and one has to question whether its orders for A330-300s and 787-8s is sustainable if its footprint shrinks.

Gulf Air can be rescued but will need to make some pretty radical changes if it aims to survive, let alone compete with more agility against its GCC rivals," he said.