Finland’s national carrier, Finnair, has announced the resumption of Europe-Asia services.
Since the country’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs closed borders to all non-essential travel on 19 March, Finnair has had to scale back its operations to 5 per cent of regular carrying capacity.
“We expect aviation to recover gradually, starting in July,” said Finnair chief commercial officer Ole Orvér on Monday. “Our intention is to operate approximately 30 per cent of our normal amount of flights in July, and we will also start long-haul flights to our key Asian destinations.
“We will then add routes and frequencies month by month as demand recovers.”
We have published our new traffic plan: from 1 July, we fly to some 40 destinations. Check out the routes we’re operating and find out how the traffic planning is done as travel restrictions are gradually lifted: https://t.co/DcH5r5BePI pic.twitter.com/Dm09eLcrcQ
— Finnair (@Finnair) May 18, 2020
Finnair also stated that the company will begin phasing in scheduled services to east Asian cities as of July, which are “strategically important” for the airline.
Destinations announced include:
- Beijing;
- Hong Kong;
- Shanghai;
- Nagoya;
- Osaka;
- Tokyo (Narita);
- Singapore;
- Seoul; and
- Bangkok.
The airline also announced 26 European routes restarting in June, with that number to swell by five come August.
“Our recent customer survey shows that customers are already planning both business and leisure trips,” Orvér says. “We want to meet this demand with our network offering.”
To that end, Finnair also outlined plans to restart services to Krabi and Phuket in southern Thailand during the (European) winter season. Despite ranking as one of the US states hardest-hit by the COVID-19 outbreak, services between Helsinki and Miami (Florida) are planned to continue throughout the season.
