Qatar Airways adds additional Edinburgh flights – and some other niche routes

Qatar Airways has announced that it will increase services to Edinburgh to 14 per week during next Summer.

The current total of 10 flights per week will be increased to double-daily between July and October.  The additional flights will also use an A350.

The airline has also announced two more niche routes – Santorini, from 20th May, and Dubrovnik, from 20th April.  These routes will be operated by an Airbus A320, featuring 12 flat-bed seats in Business Class and 132 seats in Economy Class.

If you look at the list of other European cities where Qatar Airways is increasing capacity to Doha, it looks very bullish:

• Adana will increase from three to five weekly flights
• Antalya will increase from three to five weekly flights
• Athens will increase from three to four daily flights
• Belgrade will increase from seven to 10 weekly flights
• Bodrum will increase from three to five weekly flights
• Edinburgh will increase from 10 to 14 weekly flights
• Oslo will increase from 10 to 14 weekly flights
• Venice will increase from seven to 11 weekly flights
• Warsaw will increase from 14 to 18 weekly flights
• Zurich will increase from 14 to 18 weekly flights

Most of the above will use long-haul aircraft.  However, I’ve been impressed by the Qatar Airways strategy of using A320 aircraft to feed traffic into Doha from smaller airports. 

You would imagine that there are many regional airports in the UK which could support a daily A320 to Doha (assuming they bought the new long range variant) from where passengers could connect onwards.  You get a flat bed for the A320 flight and, whilst it obviously isn’t Qsuite, I think enough people would be willing to make the trade off if it meant flying direct from their local airport.

Remember that Qatar Airways flights earn Avios and British Airways Executive Club tier points.

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