Increasing connectivity, recovering routes and improving quality. This is the three-fold objective established by the Barcelona Air Routes Development Committee (CDRA) for the 2024-2025 period.

CDRA’s four promoting organisations (the Government of Catalonia’s Department of Territory, Barcelona City Council’s International Economic Promotion, AENA and the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce) have once again shown their commitment to meeting one of the organisation’s foundational goals: Promoting intercontinental flights from the Catalan capital.

Although the airport recovered most of its priority connections in 2023, as Asian countries opened up, now it is entering into a new phase, focusing on forging new markets and providing greater flight frequency. For this reason, the goals of the Strategic Plan have been substantially revised in order to respond to the aviation sector’s post-COVID reality and the global challenges it is facing.

The CDRA has, therefore, identified two categories of routes that are still not being served, as shown in the figure below. The main priority is the big global metropolises, in terms of international competitiveness and influence, with a large demand for Barcelona, some of which were operating in 2019 and have not yet recovered. In this regard, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Lima, Delhi and Tokyo have become the biggest strategic markets. In parallel, other Priority 2 destinations have also been identified and characterised using the same criteria.

The presented plan has also analysed routes that are currently operational but which could be improved in regard to the quality of their offer, taking into account the large existing passenger demand. In this regard, seasonal routes have been prioritised, with the aim of minimising their seasonal nature (e.g., San Francisco, Chicago and Washington DC), along with other routes that run all year round but with a low flight frequency and are therefore subject to improvement (including Santiago, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Singapore). With these destinations, the aim is to increase the number of flights throughout the year, reducing their seasonal nature as far as possible in order to make them more attractive to business passengers.

It should be noted that in recent years, due to the CDRA’s activities, various airline companies have opted for Barcelona and opened new intercontinental flights, increasing flight frequency with the aim of generating greater attraction for business passengers and helping the economic development of Barcelona and Catalonia.

More specifically, this year’s plans for Barcelona – El Prat Airport include recovering the Hong Kong route (Cathay Pacific) and obtaining new intercontinental links, such as Dallas (American Airlines), Miami (LEVEL) and San Francisco (United Airlines). Existing routes are also being consolidated, including additional daily flights to New York with Delta Airlines and the third daily Qatar Airways flight to Doha.

The fact that Level has confirmed that they now have their airline operating certificate is of vital importance to the airport in terms of developing new long-haul destinations and its capacity for generating connection traffic, thanks to the Vueling agreements. There will, therefore, be 3 regular companies – Volotea, Vueling and Level– with central offices in Barcelona, providing greater industry added value and knowledge.