By the summer of next year, Swiss will bring its quality air service to a further 22 European destinations.
Destinations will include cities in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Sweden and Finland. There will also be new services to Malta and Sarajevo (Bosnia).
The Zurich-based airline (part of the Lufthansa group) will spend huge sums of money on augmenting its European network, improving the onboard product and installing new seating on its Airbus fleet.
In short, it means that Zurich will become a more attractive hub airport.
The news appears on the German aviation website airportzentrale.de. It is true that some of these destinations are served by Swiss on a seasonal basis so they are not strictly "new". But on the other hand most of these cities will be new to the Swiss network.
At the same time there will be revised onboard catering and a refurbishment of Swiss’ short-haul Airbus fleet of A320 and A321 planes.
But the latter news is not all rosy. Swiss intends to install more seats onn its Airbus fleet (another 12 seats for the A320, another 19 for the A321) and it would suggest that these will be similar to Lufthansa’s ‘space saver’ seating which a number of readers have criticised for its comfort on longer sectors.
Why the changes? For starters it’s because Swiss faces more competition than it ever did in the past. Switzerland is a relatively small market for the foreign carriers but it is a lucrative one too on account of its strong currency and high fares.
So it’s little wonder that some others seek a slice of the action. Emirates, for example, finds it can fill a daily A380 along with a large B777-300ER out of Zurich. And then there’s a daily B777-300ER into Geneva.
Etihad recently absorbed Darwin Airline (now renamed Etihad Regional) which it is using as a regional feeder for its flights out of both Zurich and Geneva. Not to be overlooked is Qatar Airways with flights to both these cities.
Then there’s SIA with a daily A380 into Zurich while Cathay Pacific has announced it will restart its Zurich service in summer 2015 with a B777-300ER.
The other reason is that instead of restricting itself to something of a niche long-haul airline (Swiss currently, unlike the former Swissair’s B747s, has no overly large planes in its fleet) Swiss will become more of a volume carrier in 2016.
That is when it starts taking delivery of a fleet of six B777-300ERS which will be used to serve key long-haul destinations as Business Traveller has reported (see news June 7, 2013).
Although Swiss has yet to release details of the onboard accommodation, it will have many more seats to fill.
And hence the need for to encourage more travellers to fly through, rather than to or from, Zurich.
Alex McWhirter
