News: Finnair plans to fly to Mumbai, Chennai

(BL 05/09/2006) Helsinki - India's financial capital Mumbai and the home of Finnish mobile giant Nokia's production facility, Chennai, figure prominently in the expansion plans of Finnair.

The Finnish carrier, which would be launching its maiden scheduled air service to New Delhi on October 30, hopes to connect either Chennai or Mumbai starting summer 2007.

"Nokia would obviously like us to operate services to Chennai, but it alone cannot fill up our flights," a top Finnair executive said here.

He said a decision would be taken only after carefully studying the market. The airline is looking at wooing Indian corporate travellers by introducing lie-flat beds in the business class.

While the Helsiniki-New Delhi service is Finnair's first scheduled service to India, the carrier has been operating leisure flights to Goa in summers for many years now. It also uses Ahmedabad for technical landing for its leisure flights to Phuket and w ould start using Jaipur for the purpose in the days ahead.

The expansion of services would happen only after the airline increases the frequency of its Helsinki-New Delhi flight to five a week from the initial three.

"If we want to be a serious player, ideally the product would be seven flights a week," Jukka Hienonen, CEO, Finnair said.

The airline hopes to sell Helsinki-Vantaa as a convenient hub for travelling to European destinations, and pointed out that travel via existing hubs such as Frankfurt or Copenhagen has become cumbersome and time consuming.