Gulf Air, the national carrier of Bahrain, has announced its new winter schedule 2011 featuring more flights, increased frequencies, additional capacities, improved connectivity and modified timings on several routes.The winter schedule will come into effect from October 30.Gulf Air is now a more dynamic and agile airline than ever before and the new winter schedule is a reflection of this,said Karim Makhlouf, Gulf Air chief commercial officer.

Before drawing up the winter schedule, our commercial and network planning teams studied the travel patterns of our customers across our route network and their needs. The good news is that our ever-popular regional destinations in the UAE and Kuwait have seen tremendous increase in traffic indicating the need to augment our fleet and frequency.In addition, our new and re-launched routes such as Addis Ababa, Colombo, Nairobi and Beirut have proved to be very successful with high load factors, endorsing the fact our renewed focus in the Middle East and Africa is working very well. The travel patterns also indicated that our customers are looking for better and newer connections and more convenient flight timings,he added.

The new schedule not only offers our customers an even more seamless and faster connectivity to newer destinations via Bahrain but also leverages our unique advantage of operating the largest network in the Middle East, which is a key differentiator for today’s busy travellers,Makhlouf continued.With approximately 700 flights per week within the Middle East region, flying is fast becoming a commodity for our customers as they have multiple flight choices. Our aim is geared towards this; we will offer our customers the best network of destinations, more flight choices, excellent connectivity to  different market segments, newer aircraft, consistent and high quality products and above all, a real value-for–money to our customers,” he concluded.Gulf Air has also announced a special winter promo fares to several destinations starting at BD35 ($93) to Dubai and BD45 to Abu Dhabi excluding taxes.