Finnair is upping the number of weekly flights on its routes between Helsinki and Tokyo and Nagoya for the upcoming winter season.
Between October 28, 2018 and December 5, Finnair’s services to Tokyo Narita will be getting two extra weekly flights, bringing the current daily service to a nine-times-weekly operation. These will come in the form of a new twice-weekly flight, AY71/AY72 that will depart Helsinki on Wednesdays and Sundays, and leave Tokyo on Mondays and Thursdays.
Flight AY71 will fly out of Helsinki just under an hour earlier than its current daily AY73 service, at 1635, arriving in Tokyo the following morning at 0905. The return AY72 will similarly depart Tokyo 55 minutes before the daily AY74, at 1100, which lands back in Helsinki at 1415 the same day.
As with the airline’s current daily service, the twice-weekly flights will be flown using the airline’s Airbus A350 aircraft, which it uses primarily for its long-haul routes to Asia. These come with three classes, offering 208 seats in economy class, 43 in Economy Comfort and 46 in business.
Last month, Finnair also unveiled a new business class menu specifically for its flights from Tokyo to Helsinki, which have been developed by Tokyo-based chef Rika Maezawa, the first Japanese chef to feature as part of the airline’s “Signature Chef” programme.
Business Traveller conducted reviews of Finnair’s A350 business class product, both on its Helsinki-Hong Kong route and most recently Helsinki-London Heathrow.
Meanwhile a day later, the airline’s AY79/AY80 flights between Helsinki and Nagoya will get one extra weekly flight, bringing the total to six between October 29 and December 4. Flights will depart Helsinki every day of the week except Wednesdays, and will leave Nagoya on all days except Thursdays during this period.
Finnair deploys its A330-300 aircraft on this route, which come with either 289 or 263 seats. Both feature the same business class layout – an alternating 2-2-1/1-2-1 configuration – though some layouts feature 13 additional business class seats in a separate area directly in front of the economy cabin.
The airline’s frequency increases to Tokyo and Nagoya follow its previous plans to add extra winter flights to a number of its other Asia routes, notably Osaka, Hong Kong, Delhi and Phuket routes, which it announced in January.
These additional frequencies are aided by its securing of overflying rights by the Russian government in May last year, which enables the carrier to fly as many as 80 flights per week via the Trans-Siberian route to Asia.
Since then, the carrier also has announced new Asia services as well as increased frequencies, most notably to Nanjing, which is set to take off on May 13 this year.
