Qatar Airways to resume Mogadishu flights

A Qatar Airways plane. FILE PHOTO | NMG 

By BONFACE OTIENO
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Qatar Airways will resume flights to Mogadishu on Sunday, a month after the Somali government lifted restrictions on international air travel following the easing of Covid-19 restrictions.

In a statement on Friday, the airline said it will fly three times a week between the Somalia capital and its hub in Doha from September 6.

The resumption of flights on the route will see the global carrier operate 40 weekly flights to the continent across nine destinations including Addis Ababa, Dar es Salaam, Djibouti, Kigali, Kilimanjaro, Nairobi, Tunis and Zanzibar.

The airline will also increase Doha-Djibouti flights to six weekly on Sunday.

Qatar Airways group chief executive Akbar Al Baker said by mid-September, the airline expects to operate 650 weekly flights to more than 85 destinations worldwide and will offer more flexible booking options.

“The recovery of international travel will take time but returning to over 50 per cent of our pre-Covid-19 network is a significant milestone.

“By continuing to fly during the pandemic while others stopped, we have gained the trust of passengers as an airline they can rely on...and as entry restrictions ease and we resume more of our pre-Covid-19 network, we remain focused on our fundamental mission of carrying passengers across the globe safely and reliably," he said.

The global carrier has been running its operations to select destinations on special passes that allow repatriates to fly home.

The special pass operations has seen them run about 100 charter flights that ferried about one million people to various destinations across the world.

Changes

Apart from Mogadishu, the airline will also resume flights to Kathmandu in Nepal, and Philadelphia in the US on September 5 and 16 respectively.

The airline that resumed 14 weekly flights to Nairobi on August 7.

“We are proud to be the leading global airline connecting passengers with the world, operating one of the youngest, most fuel-efficient and sustainable fleets to take people safely to where they need to be,” Mr Al Baker said.

The carrier has also extended its booking policies to allow passengers to change the date of their travel as well as the destination within 5,000 miles of the original destination without incurring additional costs for travel completed before December 31, this year.

“All tickets booked for travel up to 31 December 2020 will be valid for two years from the date of issuance,” the airline said.