Middle East’s largest network carrier adds Addis Ababa, Basra and Isfahan to network

National airline announces new winter schedule

Airline’s new strategy on-track

Following the recent announcement of its commencement of services to Aden and Colombo, Gulf Air, the national carrier of the Kingdom of Bahrain, announced today launching of services to three more destinations- Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, Basra in Iraq and Isfahan in Iran.   

At the press conference held today at Gulf Hotel, Gulf Air Chief Executive Officer Mr. Samer Majali announced that services to these five destinations are being rolled out from September 2010, coinciding with the airline’s winter schedule, which was also released today. 

Accordingly, Gulf Air will begin services to Isfahan from 30 October with three weekly services while services to Aden via Sana’a  and Colombo will be from 31 October with five weekly services. Basra service will also be launched on 31 October with three weekly services. Addis Ababa will be served from 06 December with five weekly services.

“The launching of these five new destinations further demonstrates our new strategy to identify and serve niche and under-served markets and, create potentially high yield city-pairs by providing direct service to Bahrain and beyond,” said Mr. Majali.

“While none of the Gulf carriers are serving Aden and Basra at present, cities like Addis Ababa and Isafahan are unexplored markets with Colombo being a popular tourist destination that is not linked from Bahrain since 2002. We believe there is a strong commercial potential in all these cities and we hope these routes also will be successful like the other six routes that we recently launched.”   

He continued, “By launching these destinations we are not only enabling the people and businesses of these countries to connect to one of the fastest growing economies but also reinforcing our position as the undisputed leader in connecting the Middle East region.”

Releasing the new winter schedule, Mr. Majali highlighted some key features.

“The new winter schedule reflects one of the main objectives of our new strategy - to serve every regional capital with at least a double-daily service and generate a new market of travelers, who wish to conduct their business in the region and return home the same day.”

“Currently passengers can fly to the GCC countries of  Abu Dhabi, Dammam, Doha, Dubai, Kuwait and Muscat conduct their business and return home in the same day with a number of flight options. We have taken this concept further in our new winter schedule by offering three times a week same day return flights to Riyadh, Jeddah, Beirut, Cairo and two times a week same day return flights to Amman and Damascus in addition to the daily flights to these cities.

The winter schedule will bring the number of flights in the region per week to 644 from last year’s flights of 528.”

“Another core element of our new strategy is to strengthening  our international network  and connect customers with seamless onward connections via Bahrain with least possible waiting time. As such we have made several improvements in our winter timetable; the frequency to and from Kathmandu have been increased from 9 to 11 per week  while  new split timings have been introduced on Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok routes to provide better  connectivity for our Europe flights to connect to these two cities via Bahrain.”

Mr. Majali also touched upon the airline’s new strategy and its progress so far.

He said, “The new business strategy that we rolled out last November is moving on the right track and has been proving successful. I am glad to say that we have been able to make some notable achievements despite the challenges posed by the economic recession and other natural causes such as the recent volcano ash cloud incident.”

“In the last 13 months we have launched services to 11 new destinations; this is something that we are proud of; we haven’t opened so many routes in such a short timeframe since 1976. We had to suspend four routes that were no longer  commercially viable for the airline and did not reflect customer needs.”

Mr. Majali continued, “Our Technical Dispatch Reliability has reached an average of 99.1% during the last six months while we have improved upon our on-time punctuality (OTP) by 4%- from 69% to 73%. Our OTP is based on the scheduled time of departure unlike normal industry standard time of departure plus fifteen minutes; this is a demonstration of how we push ourselves to provide service to our customers on time every time.”

“We took delivery of ten brand new aircraft – 8 A320s and 2 E170s  and phased out nine older planes – 5 leased A320s and 4 A340s, reducing our fleet’s average age by four years- from 11.7 years to 7.8 years. By the end of next month two additional aircraft - E190s will be joining our fleet and three more older aircraft will be phased out further reducing the average age of our fleet to 6.8 years. In the next three years 13 more new aircraft will join our fleet reducing the average age to just 4.1 years making Gulf Air’s fleet one of the youngest in the region.”

“We are working hard to improve our product offering to ensure our customers get a superior, more consistent product throughout our range of flights and destinations. The two Embraer regional jets that were recently introduced with luxurious outfit including full in-seat interactive entertainment throughout the aircraft, offer great value for money to our customers. These will be joined by two additional aircraft later this year. We have introduced Falcon Gold – the premium travel experience that offers the best of Gulf Air’s first class service for the cost of a Business Class ticket.”

“The Board has approved installation of state-of –the-art in-flight entertainment system in the entire aircraft cabin on our new A320s and A330s  with improved Falcon seat comfort in the business class as of next year.”

“By optimizing our fleet network efficiency we have  made a saving on 15% on our fuel  consumption during Jan-June 2010 which is a significant cost saving to the company. Our overall costs have also been reduced by 3% through actively rationalizing all cost elements of the business and curtailing expenditure that  doesn’t add value to our customers and the business.”

Commenting on the manpower strength of the company, Mr, Majali said, “we have successfully reduced our current staff strength by just under 1000 in the last twelve months whilst at the same time our efforts to encourage and employ more Bahrainis are paying off. Our overall Bahrainisation level has reached 52% in Bahrain.”

“We have been aggressive in driving efficiencies and matching capacity to demand; as a result our yield and our fleet utilization has improved with our seat factor growth registering a healthy 7% growth  - from 66.1% to 72.8% compared to the same period last year.”

In conclusion Mr. Majali said, “While we concentrate on the present, our  focus  is firmly fixed on the future. Let me assure you we will continue to identify new markets, improve our customer service delivery standards and, introduce new products on the ground and in the air.”

“I strongly believe that our business should reflect, on one hand, the needs and demands of our customers without whom we don’t have a business. On the other, we need to build a national airline that serves the needs and aspirations of people and the economy of Bahrain that we can all be proud of.”

“I am sure you will agree that we have made some notable achievements in meeting these goals despite the challenges and, I am confident we will be able to succeed,” Mr. Majali concluded.