Not happy with just a new third daily rotation by Emirates Airline to Dubai, the air service development team at Birmingham Airport are attending the inaugural Routes Middle East & Africa forum in Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain to secure additional connectivity into the regions.
Icelandair’s existing Tuesday and Saturday schedules will be complemented by Monday and Thursday rotations from February 2016 and will not only open up new opportunities of travelling to and from Iceland but also across to North America on the airline’s growing network in Canada and the United States from its Keflavik International Airport.
Potential future non-stop flights to Guangzhou from Birmingham will be possible thanks to an investment by Birmingham Airport to extend its runway to enable longer haul flights. The development was opened in April 2014 by the Prime Minister and was inaugurated by the first Birmingham-Beijing charter service in July 2014.
Air connectivity is hugely important to Waterford and the surrounding southeast region. This has been underlined time and again by inward investment and economic development agencies. These new services will be a key driver for incoming tourists from the UK, especially at a time when the Eurozone is particularly attractive to UK travellers.
The new flights, which will operate twice weekly on Fridays and Mondays, between July 3, 2015 and August 28, 2015, will carry almost 4,000 Chinese tourists into the UK on package tours and will contribute a forecasted £19 million to the regional economy.
UK multinational pharmaceutical and biologics company AstraZeneca is understood to have reached an agreement with Danish carrier Sun-Air for the airline to introduce two rotations per day, four days per week between Cambridge and Gothenburg from the end of March this year.
United Arab Emirates (UAE) national carrier Emirates Airline is to introduce a third daily rotation on its route between Dubai International Airport and Birmingham Airport in the UK. The new flight, operated by a Boeing 777-300ER will commence from August 1, 2015, and opened for reservations earlier today (December 22, 2015).
Norwegian will make its debut at Birmingham at the end of March 2015 with a three times weekly service from Malaga commencing on March 30, 2015 and a three times weekly route to Madrid following from March 31, 2015. The third route to Barcelona will follow from June 1, 2015 and will be flown on a twice weekly basis.
At Routesonline we've decided to take a look back at the news breaking the same week in previous years and revisit it one or two years later to see what’s happened since we released the news.
The low-cost Spanish airline has announced 31 new routes for its summer schedule, mainly departing from Barcelona and Rome. The airline has also announced its first destination to Northern Ireland, to operate twice weekly.
The two new seasonal flights between New York and Birmingham and Edinburgh will be launched from May 7, 2015 and will be operated using a 182-seat Boeing 757-200 configured with 22 Business Class and 160 Economy seats. Both flights will operate under a codeshare arrangement with British Airways through their joint transatlantic business.
The UK airport is growing quickly and the recent extension of its Runway has opened up additional long-haul opportunities for the airport. We spent a little time with Paul Kehoe during the recent World Routes in Chicago to learn more about the latest developments at Birmingham Airport and learnt that this year’s forum will probably prove to be its “best Routes ever”.
The new stores, many of which are the first of their kind to open in the UK, follow the enormous growth in long haul markets at Birmingham in the past twelve months, including direct charter flights to China and the popular Air India service to Delhi and Amritsar. These services are set to continue demand for high value retail and product innovation.
The five times weekly service to Berlin Tegel and daily services to Hamburg and Oslo will commence from Sunday 26th October through to Friday 27th March, cementing Flybe’s position as Birmingham Airport’s biggest carrier.
Birmingham Airport has announced the completion of a new purpose-built transit and transfer facility, providing passengers with the UK’s fastest and most efficient option for onward connecting flights. The new facility delivers an airside connection that allows passengers to transit and transfer within the airside environment in under 45 minutes.
Since launching flights on the Amritsar - Delhi - Birmingham route on a four times weekly schedule on August 1, 2013, the carrier has handled more than eighty thousand passengers onboard 210 return flights, providing better connectivity between the Midlands and India for business passengers, tourists and people visiting friends and relatives.
The carrier will launch a twice daily operation between London City and Aberdeen from October 27, 2014 using a 78-seat Bombardier Dash 8-Q400 following British Airways’ recent announcement that it would be withdrawing from the route at the end of the summer season.
The new route will operate on a twice weekly basis from February 5, 2015 and will be Icelandair's fifth destination in the UK and 39th across its expanding network.
Flybe has confirmed it will launch new daily links from Birmingham to Hamburg and Oslo from October 26, 2014 through to March 27, 2015, while its new summer 2014 flights to Bordeaux, Cologne, Florence, Oporto, Reykjavik and Toulouse will be extended through the winter season.
The move to introduce these routes is part of the UK’s largest tour operator’s strategy to ensure customers across the UK can fly from their local airport. There are also frequency increases enabling customers more choice and the ability to book a mix of seven, ten, eleven or 14 night holidays rather than the existing week and fortnight options.
