Qatar Airways to start
flights to Nagpur

Qatar Airways sees tremendous potential in Nagpur

BY A CORRESPONDENT
February 7, 2006

Qatar's state-owned airline Qatar Airways is planning to start non-stop scheduled services between Doha, its operational hub, and the Maharashtrian city of Nagpur. The route will be operated with an Airbus A320 in a two-class configuration of 12 seats in business class and 132 in economy.
 

Qatar Airways Chief Executive Officer Akbar Al Baker,is pictured centre addressing a press conference in New Delhi today where he announced plans by the airline to launch flights between Doha and Nagpur this summmer. With him are the airline's Senior Manager Commercial Operations (East) Ali Al Rais, (left) and Area Manager India, Naveen Chawla

Qatar Airlines currently operates 30 flights a week between Qatar and five Indian cities – New Delhi, Mumbai, Trivandrum, Hyderabad and Kochi. While the airline operates seven flights a week to Delhi, Mumbai and Trivandrum, it flies four times a week to Hyderabad and five times to Kochi.

According to Qatar Airways Chief Executive Officer Akbar al Baker, "Nagpur is an unknown destination on the global map and there were only a handful of airlines on this route. There is incredible potential".

"Nagpur is underserved both domestically and internationally by air carriers, but this city offers good business opportunities as it is also one of India's largest inland container transport hubs. Our flights in and out of India have proved extremely successful and the addition of Nagpur will greatly enhance our product offering to the travelling public to and from India," he said.

Qatar Airways is also to expand its global network further this year with at least 10 new routes. This will take its total number of destinations to 69, across the world.

Daily flights between Doha and Hong Kong were slated to begin on March 26, and Qatar Airways' inaugural services to US are scheduled to start later this year. The airline would be adding capacity to a range of existing European destinations like Manchester, Athens, Paris, Frankfurt and Madrid, besides Bangkok and Osaka in Japan.

This year, the airline Qatar Airways would expand its global network with at least 10 new routes, taking the current network to 69 destinations worldwide.

It would also operate a large number of additional flights to ferry passengers for the Doha Asian Games this year-end.