KUALA LUMPUR – British Airways (BA) has cancelled services to Kuala Lumpur and other long-haul destinations next year as the aviation industry continues to reel from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Besides Kuala Lumpur, other cities in the region with flights scrapped include Seoul and Osaka, effectively shrinking BA’s footprint across Asia.
Other destinations that have been removed are popular holiday destination Seychelles, Middle Eastern cities Muscat, Jeddah and Abu Dhabi, and North American cities Pittsburgh, Calgary, and Charleston.
BA will also temporarily suspend flights to Sydney, Bangkok, and San Jose until the end of October next year but the daily London-Singapore route will remain open.
An airlines spokesman told travel publication Executive Traveller that these changes were “due to the current coronavirus pandemic and global travel restrictions”.
In a previous statement, BA said the pandemic hit it harder than anything ever before, outstripping losses during the global financial crisis in 2008 and the September 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York.
The airline registered a net loss of £4 billion (RM22 billion) in the first half of this year, leading it to cut 10,000 staff, in a move to conserve cash and limit burning through reserves after passenger numbers collapsed. – The Vibes, December 18, 2020
