VILNIUS - Lietuvos Avialinijos (Lithuanian Airlines) and Ukraine's national carrier Donbasaero Airline announced last week that together they would launch a regular code-sharing route - Kiev-Vilnius-Kiev - starting this week.
In accordance to their agreement, LAL will operate three weekly flights to the Ukrainian capital, while Donbasaero Airline would reserve a certain number of seats on the planes, Giedrius Sniukas, LAL spokesman, told the Baltic News Service.
LAL will operate a 45-seat plane ATR leased from the Kaunas-based air carrier Lietuva (Lithuania) on the new route.
Early next year Lietuvos Avialinijos will expand its fleet with two leased Boeing 737s that will operate a regular route to Barcelona starting next summer and another new route that has not been disclosed.
The company was still negotiating with several airports, including the Scottish airport in Glasgow, Sniukas said. Unofficial sources have reported that LAL was negotiating an authorization to direct five weekly flights to that airport.
In late October, LAL opened a new route to Milan, raised the number of weekly flights to London and Copenhagen, and boosted the capacity of planes on the route to Moscow in cooperation with Russia's carrier Aeroflot.
For the first half of 2004, LAL reported 95.4 million litas (27.6 million euros) in revenues on core and other regular operations, a rise of 2.7 percent from the year-earlier figure. The carrier trimmed its interim losses by 5.4 percent year-on-year to 3.5 million litas.
