Thai Airways Selects Brussels for European Growth

Thai Airways International is to inaugurate flights between Bangkok and Brussels, its eleventh destination in Europe. The airport has been negotiating the new route for a number of years but discussions intensified over the past three months after Brussels Airport executives learnt that the Thai national carrier had the capacity to introduce a new three times weekly link to Europe this year during a special Route Exchange briefing at the Routes Asia forum in Incheon, South Korea in March.

“We have been in talks with Thai Airways for several years to add to the growing Star Alliance hub at Brussels,” Leon Verhallen, Head of Aviation Marketing, Brussels Airport told The HUB during this week’s IATA Slots event in Gothenburg, Sweden. “At Routes Asia, Thai Airways announced during their Route Exchange briefing, that three weekly frequencies had become available for Europe. We saw many airports competing for this but are very pleased that our relationship with Thai Airways, with frequent meetings at Routes events, has resulted in today's announcement”.

Thai Airways will offer a three times weekly schedule on the route from November 17 becoming the only carrier to offer non-stop scheduled flights between the two countries. It previously served Brussels in the mid-1990s as an extension of its three times weekly Bangkok – Stockholm flight. An estimated 103,000 O&D passengers travelled between Brussels and Bangkok in the past year, the greatest share flying via Abu Dhabi with Etihad Airways (26 per cent), followed by Copenhagen with SAS Scandinavian Airlines (16 per cent) and Cairo International with EgyptAir (nine per cent).

The airline will use a Boeing 777-200ER with 30 Business Class and 262 Economy seats and will offer a schedule that will offer onward connections throughout Asia and Australasia from Bangkok. Thai Airways already operates non-stop services to ten destinations in Europe, comprising Athens, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, London, Moscow, Munich, Oslo, Paris, Stockholm and Zurich. The table below highlights the top ten European destinations based on O&D traffic from/to Bangkok Suvarnabhumi International Airport. Thai Airways is the dominant airline in nine of these ten markets, holding second spot to Transaero Airlines on the route to Moscow Domodedovo.

“We are delighted that the Route Exchange briefings that are held at Routes events, act as a clear and effective tool for airlines achieving real success in their network development plans and in helping our airport clients to gain real results,” added David McMullen, Business Development Director, Routesonline.