Austrian Airlines has announced that it will restart its regularly scheduled flights on 15 June 2020, following a grounding that lasted nearly 90 days. The first week will see 27 routes open, including London, Paris and Brussels, rising to 37 destinations the following week.
Austrian Airlines’ CCO, Andreas Otto, also stated that long-haul routes could soon follow: “We will resume long-haul flight service as soon as we have sufficient feeder traffic on short- and medium-haul routes. This could already be the case in July”.
Passengers are required to bring their own face masks to wear on board. The airline’s guidelines for seating layouts says: ‘When selecting or assigning seats, the general directive is that passengers who do not live in the same household should disperse themselves throughout the aircraft as far apart from each other as possible. However, in the case of high capacity utilisation, no passenger will be refused a seat in order to keep a neighbouring seat free.’
The details:
Austrian Airlines will offer flights to the following destinations in the first week of resuming flight operations: Amsterdam, Athens, Basel, Berlin, Brussels, Bucharest, Dubrovnik, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Geneva, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Larnaca, London, Munich, Paris, Pristina, Sarajevo, Skopje, Sofia, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Tel Aviv, Thessaloniki, Tirana, Varna and Zurich.
In the following week, from 22-28 June 2020, the airline will operate flights to additional destinations, including Belgrade, Graz, Innsbruck, Kyiv, Košice, Milan, Nice, Prague, Split and Warsaw.
The plan is to open up 37 destinations in the first two weeks of resuming flight operations, subject to official restrictions, and offer an average of 5% capacity compared to this period last year. In the initial phase, the airline will primarily deploy smaller aircraft such as the Embraer 195 and Dash 8. The airline is currently developing a flight schedule for July and will provide the relevant information in the near future.
“We all are pleased that Austrian Airlines is finally flying again. I would like to thank our customers for their patience and understanding. And of course, I would like to thank our employees who stood firm in their commitment,” stated Otto.
