Polish airline to fly to Vietnam in November

Poland’s LOT Airlines has announced its plan to make its maiden passenger flight from Warsaw to Hanoi in November this year, offering passengers more air connections between Europe and Vietnam in the winter schedule.
The Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam (CAAV) confirmed with the Daily that the Polish carrier had been granted the traffic right to fly on the Warsaw-Hanoi route on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays from November 13.
LOT Airlines has loaded fares for the Warsaw-Hanoi service on www.lot.com, with the return fare starting from 2,450 Polish zloty, or equivalent to US$800. The carrier said on this website that tickets to Hanoi were also available for purchase at ticketing offices and sales agents.
LOT Airlines, a member of STAR as the world’s biggest airline alliance, will operate its Boeing B767-300 aircraft for the Warsaw-Hanoi service.
The route to Vietnam’s capital city of Hanoi is one of LOT’s 10 new routes to be opened this year. With this route, LOT will join the list of carriers operating non-stop flights between Vietnam and Europe.
Currently, Vietnam Airlines has direct services from Hanoi and HCMC to Germany’s Frankfurt and France’s Paris and vice versa. Air France now conducts flights between Paris and Vietnam via Thailand’s Bangkok, but is planning non-stop services to Vietnam.
Thierry Beragnes, country manager of Air France in Vietnam, told the Daily last week that the European carrier’s schedule to operate non-stop flights between Paris and this emerging market later this year.
Other foreign airlines including Lufthansa, Qatar Airways, Thai International Airways, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines also offer flights between Vietnam and Europe via their hub airports in Bangkok, Doha, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Vietnam’s overall aviation market is picking up strongly in 2010, and this encourages local and foreign airlines to increase frequencies and launch new flights in and out of Vietnam.
Qatar Airways has recently publicized a massive plan to begin four weekly services between Qatar’s capital of Doha and Hanoi via Bangkok on November 1, and add three flights to its weekly schedule for the Doha-HCMC route to bring its total weekly services between Vietnam and Doha to 11.
CAAV’s latest figures unveiled some 45 airlines are exploiting 55 international air routes to and from Vietnam. The first half of this year recorded 15.2 million passengers and more than 273,000 tons of cargo on both domestic and international flights, up 20.3% and 31.8% respectively over the year earlier period.