Iberia Increases Schedule to Equatorial Guinea

Spanish national carrier Iberia has today added a sixth weekly flight on the Madrid – Malabo route. The airline utilises an Airbus A319 on the route, using an aircraft that is specially configured with wider Business Class seats like some of its other longer distance medium-haul routes to destinations including Cairo, Lagos, Moscow and Tel Aviv. The new aircraft was introduced in October last year and the airline says premium demand has risen by around ten per cent since then.

Iberia says it carried some 41,200 passengers on this route in 2010, a 7.7 per cent increase for the year. Nearly 50 per cent of these passengers flew on to other destinations, the most popular being São Paulo, followed by Barcelona, Cairo, Lisbon, and Valencia. The O&D demand between the two cities was an estimated 34,000 passengers for the year ending June 2011, with Iberia carrying around 68 per cent of these passengers – the remainder using the flights of Air Europa.

The Spanish carrier has been expanding its activity in Africa and alongside Malabo flies to ten destinations in the continent - Algiers, Oran, Cairo, Casablanca, Marrakech, Rabat, Tangier Lagos, Dakar and Johannesburg. It will introduce a twice weekly service to Luanda, Angola from October 28, while it serves nine further cities through codeshare partners.