After a three-year hiatus brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese and Dutch carriers started operating direct flights from Amsterdam to Beijing once again on Sunday (March 26).
Passengers were presented with colorful wooden tulip flowers as gifts to mark the memorable occasion at a boarding gate at Schiphol Airport for a fully-booked China Southern Airlines flight to Beijing.
The passengers departed from the Schiphol Airport at 8:40 p.m. local time and were scheduled to arrive at Beijing Daxing International Airport after a 10-hour flight.
Wilco Sweijen, airline partnerships director at Schiphol Airport, said that it was the first time that the airport was having flight between Beijing Daxing and Amsterdam.
Mack Su, European sales manager of the Chinese airline, said that the Amsterdam-Beijing route was disrupted in March 2020 due to COVID-19, and its resumption marked the airline's "comprehensive and accelerated recovery in the China-Europe market."
The new Amsterdam-Beijing Daxing route will start with four weekly flights and increase in accordance with market demand, said Su. Besides the Beijing route, China Southern Airlines also operates flights between Amsterdam and Guangzhou, a metropolis in south China, four times a week.
Also on Sunday, a flight of KLM, a Dutch airline, left Schiphol Airport for Beijing Capital International Airport, marking the resumption of KLM's flight route to Beijing disrupted by the pandemic.
In an earlier press release, the Dutch airline said it marked the "recovery of the routes from and via Amsterdam to China. The Chinese market is important in KLM's network, due to demand from business travelers."
The number of flights between the Netherlands and China has now increased to 27 a week from only six about a year ago due to higher passenger flows, Sweijen said.
"That's only passenger flights," he stressed, expressing the belief that more flights could be added in the near future.
Comment