Having already secured a strong position in the domestic Mexican market, Volaris has been focussing on developing its international network. With the addition of its new service to Reno and previously announced link to Fort Lauderdale it will serve 17 international destinations with 38 routes by year-end. These are targeted at travellers wishing to visit friends and family on both sides of the border providing better travel options for the Hispanic communities in these regions.
Thomson Airways are to increase their long-haul capacity and fly to new destinations, including the only direct flight from the UK to Costa Rica in November 2015.
Today, Emirates fleet investment in Africa tops $7 billion with operating costs of over $2 billion and it currently operates to 22 passenger and six dedicated freighter destinations in Africa perating over 160 flights across the continent each week, connecting African economies and markets with Dubai and beyond to a global network of over 140 major cities.
The charity is currently running an appeal in line with World Sight Day 2014 to help eliminate avoidable blindness in Ethiopia, which has one of the highest rates of vision loss in the world. One of the conditions the appeal will raise money to tackle is trachoma which was wiped out in the UK 60 years ago, but is still the leading global cause of infectious blindness. Ethiopia has one of the highest known rates of the disease in the world.
Air India plans to operate a four times weekly schedule from October 14, 2014 using an ATR 42 of its subsidiary Air India Regional, formerly Alliance Air. It says the new route will “provide quick and convenient connection to government officials, business travellers, students and tourists, among others”.
UK leisure carrier Jet2.com, the largest operator at Blackpool Airport, has already revealed it will move its entire operation to Manchester Airport from October 10, 2014, while Aer Lingus Regional and Citywing will maintain services to Dublin, Belfast City and the Isle of Man until the closure of the airport on October 15, 2014.
Icelandic carrier WOW air is to launch a new year-round link between Reykjavik and Dublin from next summer. The three times weekly route will commence on June 2, 2015 and will be the first scheduled service between the two cities.
The carrier will launch service to four new markets during the first quarter of 2015 with daily direct flights from Miami International Airport to Austin-Bergstrom, Kansas City, Salt Lake City and San Antonio. These flights will commence on March 5, 2015 and will be flown by a Boeing 737-800.
Virgin Atlantic will end the Little Red flights, operated on its behalf by Aer Lingus, during summer 2015. The London Heathrow – Manchester route will close at the end of March 2015 and the links from the UK capital to Aberdeen and Edinburgh at the end of September 2015.
The new link will operate from May 29, 2015 until October 23, 2015 using a Boeing 737-700 and like the existing St John’s – Dublin transatlantic operation will provide a same-aircraft connection to and from Toronto with other connections available to Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and 16 other cities in WestJet's Canadian network.
Initially, British Airways will operate A380 service five times a week at Washington. The service will increase to daily by the end of October. It will supplement the daily 747 flights and the three weekly 777 flights out of the airport.
The new route marks only the sixth international route to be operated to the Brazilian capital and only the second from Europe – TAP Portugal has been serving the city from its Lisbon hub on an up to daily basis since July 2007. It also represents the first intercontinental network success since private consortium Inframérica took over the management of the airport in December 2012.
LOT has been in financial difficulties for several years, reporting significant losses and negative equity, but in 2013 it recorded for the first time in five years a net profit of PLN 26 million, instead of almost PLN 200 million loss envisaged in the Restructuring Plan presented to the European Commission. This was its first annual net profit since 2007.
Swiss regional carrier SkyWork Airlines will move its twice weekday link between its Berne base and London from City Airport to Southend Airport from the start of the winter 2014/2015 schedules at the end of October, although it believes the switch will not impact its strategy to provide an efficient offering to the business traveller.
Bahrain, which is located in the Arabian Gulf, has a history of aviation that dates back to the early 1920's. Historically it has acted as a gateway between the East and West providing a natural transit destination for early trade routes and a strategic hub for the Northern Gulf.
The HUB spoke to MEC Michael Mabuyakhulu during this year’s World Routes in Chicago to learn more about next year’s World Routes when he described the event as the aviation equivalent of the Football World Cup, which was hosted by South Africa in 2010. In terms of hosting the event, he added: “Durban is ready, KwaZulu-Natal is ready and Africa is ready.”
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 carrier’s entry into Tanzania is no real surprise as the country is a regional hub for tourism in East Africa and in 2013 the country welcomed over one million tourists. According to the Tanzania Tourism Board (TTB), this figure looks set with to double with two million tourists forecast by 2017.
