South America seems to be a continent of interest for carriers in the Middle East region. Emirates in 2024 commenced operations to Colombia, via Miami, and Turkish Airlines started flying to Santiago in the final stages of 2024. Now Qatar Airways prepares to launch its latest service to South America which will add 2 new destinations to its route network.
Qatar Airways Adds 2 New South American Destinations With One Service
There are a couple of things that make he news arriving from Qatar Airways interesting:
- This new service is a fifth freedom service, not operating in a specular fashion on the outbound and return sectors. I’ll delve deeper into that in a second.
- It will make Qatar Airways one of the few airlines in the world to serve a specific country in South America.
So let me explain a little more what I meant in the two points above. First of all, Qatar Airways with its latest network expansion into South America will be serving Bogotà and Caracas, respectively capitals of Colombia and Venezuela.
The flight is a fifth freedom flight as Qatar will be landing in Bogotà first to then travel onwards to Caracas in Venezuela. It won’t, however, return from Caracas to Bogotà before returning to Doha. What it will do is depart Caracas bound, non-stop, to Doha creating a triangle of sorts.
Caracas, as mentioned it Venezuela’s capital city. For anyone living under a rock or in a cave, Venezuela due to its political leadership has become one of the most isolated countries in the world. Therefore only a handful of carriers still operate flights in and out of its major international airport. Qatar Airways is soon to become one fo the few to do so.
No Schedule Yet, But We Know Which Plane Will Operate the Route
We don’t have all that much information at the moment regarding scheduling or even the flight number at the moment as the airline is yet to put the flight up for sale on its website. What we do know, however, is which aircraft type the Qatari airline will be using for this new service.
The aircraft of choice will be the Boeing 777-200LR. Qatar Airways has two very different configurations of this aircraft type in its fleet and, unfortunately, for passengers looking to travel on this service it won’t be the nicer of the two to fly this route. What I mean by that is that there won’t be the QSuites on this route, rather the much older minipods which are setup in a 2-2-2 layout and offer a much lower level of comfort and privacy.
These Boeing 777-200LRs are setup with:
- 34 Business Class seats in a 2-2-2 layout
- 234 Economy Class seats in a standard 3-4-3 layout.
Finally Bogotà and Caracas are set to become Qatar Airways’ second and third destinations in South America, following Sà£o Paulo Guarulhos international airport.