Qatar Airways Joins oneworld Alliance

Qatar Airways Boeing 787 (image courtesy of Boeing)

Qatar Airways becomes part of oneworld® at midnight Doha time tonight, adding one of the world’s fastest growing and most highly rated airlines to the world’s fastest growing and most highly rated global airline alliance.

From its first flights tomorrow morning – QR633 which leaves Dhaka for Doha at 03.15 local (00.15 Doha time) and the QR1166 from Doha for Riyadh, leaving five minutes later at 00.20 Doha time – Qatar Airways will be offering oneworld’s full range of services and benefits.

It joins oneworld just one year after receiving its invitation to join, which makes its induction into oneworld one of the fastest in the alliance’s history. A more typical timeline for an airline to comply with the many membership requirements of oneworld is 18-24 months.

For Qatar Airways, joining oneworld marks the latest achievement in its 16-year history. One of just seven carriers worldwide rated fivestar by the Skytrax airline quality agency and the organisation’s Airline of the Year 2011 and 2012 and runner-up 2013, Qatar Airways is the only one of the major Gulf carriers to join any of the global airline alliances.

Becoming part of oneworld, which holds more “best alliance” awards than any of its competitors, will strengthen Qatar Airways’ competitiveness, enabling it to offer customers an unrivalled alliance global network served by partners that include leading airlines from every region.

Qatar Airways, which serves more than 130 destinations in 70 countries across the Middle East, Europe, Africa, North and South America, Asia and Australasia, is oneworld’s second member airline based in the Middle East. It makes oneworld the leading alliance in one of the world’s fastest growing regions for air travel demand.

More than 20 of its destinations and five countries – Ethiopia, Iran, Rwanda, Serbia and Tanzania – will be new to the oneworld map. More significantly, Qatar Airways will substantially strengthen the alliance’s customer offering by providing superior routing alternatives across many hundreds of city pairs. For example, passengers flying between Asia and Southern Europe or between Asia and Africa will now have convenient one-stop connections not previously available within the oneworld network.

Worldwide, with the other airlines lining up to join, oneworld will:

• Serve almost a thousand airports in more than 150 countries, with 14,000 daily departures.
• Carry 475 million passengers a year on a combined fleet of some 3,300 aircraft.
• Generate US$ 140 billion annual revenues.

Qatar Airways 777 in oneworld livery is first aircraft to ‘land’ at Hamad International Airport

At a ceremony to mark its entry into oneworld, held at Hamad International Airport, which will open soon as Qatar Airways’ new home base, Qatar Airways spectacularly “unveiled” the first aircraft in its fleet to be decorated in a special oneworld livery – with the Boeing 777-300 becoming the first aircraft to “land” at the new airport.

The state-of-the-art US$ 15.5 billion Hamad International Airport is designed to strengthen Doha’s role as a premium global hub. The new airport has an eventual capacity for 50 million passengers a year.