Flag carriers of Kazakhstan and Turkey have formally entered into a codeshare partnership after Peter Foster, president of Air Astana, and Temel Kotil, president and chief executive of Turkish Airlines, signed the agreement at the IATA Annual General Meeting in Cape Town yesterday. This followed a Letter of Intent for greater cooperation between the two carriers in March.
The agreement involves codesharing on flights between the two nations, and those between Istanbul and Kazakhstan's commercial city of Almaty as well as its national capital Astana come with special prorate agreements on onward sectors beyond those hubs.
Both airlines have been aggressively expanding and building up their bases as hubs. Turkish Airlines is hoping to become the gateaway to Europe (and it currently reaches about 50 European cities from Istanbul), while Air Astana, only about a decade old, has its eye on the role as Central Asia's hub airline (see story).
For more on the business development of resource-rich Kazakhstan, see "Steppes of progress" in the May issue of Business Traveller Asia-Pacific here.
Reggie Ho