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| Perera announcing daily new service yesterday |
Speaking at a press conference announcing the new flights, Lal Perera, SriLankan Airlines regional manager for Middle East and Africa, said: “Doha has, in recent years, emerged as a strategic point in our Middle Eastern portfolio of destinations. Among the primary contributory factors are economic growth coupled with new development projects coming into place.”
Until last year, Doha shared five flights with Muscat and Bahrain. However with the number of Sri Lankans working in Qatar increasing to over 90,000, SriLankan Airlines commenced single-destination flights in April this year, deploying four wide bodied A330 and A340 and a narrow bodied A320 aircraft to Doha.
“In addition to being a predominantly ‘worker traffic market’, the SriLankan Airlines team handling operations in Doha has turned it into a significant leisure and VFR (visiting friends and relatives) operation. The success of this operation is reflected in last year’s 80% increase in leisure travel out of Doha into Sri Lanka and the Far East. There’s great potential in this area and I’m confident my team can make it a 100% increase in 2011,” Perera added.
Perera said that SriLankan Airlines’ daily flights to Doha also offer connections to a host of onward destinations such as Chennai, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Tiruchirappalli, Bangalore, Male, Dhaka, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, as more flights to Indian and East Asian destinations are being added.
“With the dawn of peace in Sri Lanka, there has been a marked increase in the number of passengers travelling to Sri Lanka on vacation,” Perera said.
Sri Lankan Airlines currently reaches 61 destinations across the globe and has mutual code-share share services with bmi (British Midland), Etihad and Malaysia Airlines, while Indian Airlines, Saudi Arabian Airlines and Air Canada also code-share on some of SriLankan’s routes.
SriLankan Airlines also codeshares with Mihin Lanka, a low-cost airline, out of Colombo to Jakarta and Dhaka mainly to carry worker traffic to these countries.
