Qatar Airways Nagpur-Doha flights to be suspended

Qatar Airways has decided to suspend its flights between Nagpur in India and Doha, the capital of Qatar, from May 15, 2009. Qatar Airways, the national airline of Qatar, has been operating direct flights between Nagpur and Doha, since 2007.

The airline said in a statement that it was suspending the flights because of the “poor load factor” from the Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar International Airport in Nagpur.

Qatar Airways will become the second airline to suspend its international operations from Nagpur after the Indian government-owned airline Air India, which suspended its Hyderabad-Nagpur-Bangkok flight, in 2007.

Qatar Airways had started its twice-a-week service between Doha and Nagpur in September 2007.

According to the statement from Qatar Airways, the service between Doha and Nagpur had at first received a remarkable response from passengers since it was the only flight with connections from Nagpur to cities such as London, Washington, New York and Paris.

However, for the last few months, Qatar Airways added, the global economic recession and the poor load factor on account of mounting air fares had adversely affected operations of the Doha-Nagpur service.

Navin Chawla, regional manager for Qatar Airways, told reporters that though the carrier was “temporarily suspending” the Doha-Nagpur-Doha operations from May 15, 2009, owing to poor load factor, “it will start operations again as soon as it gets demand from passengers.”

However, timesofindia.indiatimes.com quoted another senior official of Qatar Airways as saying that the airline had suffered huge losses on account of the Nagpur-Doha service and also that the carrier was planning to pull out the service for good.

The official said that, as of now, Qatar Airways was accepting bookings for the last flight which would leave Nagpur on May 14, 2009. And, from May 15, 2009, Doha-bound passengers can book tickets from Mumbai. (The carrier operates daily flights to Doha from Mumbai.)

At present, from Nagpur, Air Arabia offers international connectivity to Sharjah and Air India Express to Dubai.

Meanwhile, Qatar Airways is seeking to add Tokyo to its large network of destinations worldwide once a new runway being built at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport is ready by March 2010.

A press release from the Japanese embassy in Doha said that Qatar Airways currently operates daily flights to Osaka in Japan and that the airline had plans to introduce services to Tokyo, the capital of Japan, after Qatar and Japan decided recently to expand their agreement on air services.