British Airways will reduce flights to the Middle East and use the freed-up planes to offer more direct services to Asia and Africa, in a sign it expects reduced demand for Gulf travel for much of the rest of this year.
The airline will not resume services to the Gulf until at least July, when it will offer significantly reduced flights to Dubai, Doha and Tel Aviv, it said on Thursday. It will drop Jeddah in Saudi Arabia as a destination and will reduce services to Riyadh from mid-May.
BA is a sister airline of Aer Lingus, which would feed some passengers into these services out of Heathrow.
Instead, BA will fly larger aircraft to Delhi and Hyderabad, and will launch additional services to Nairobi, Bengaluru and Mumbai as well as more frequent flights to Delhi.
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The revised schedule will run until October 24, when the industry’s “winter season” starts. BA has already delayed restarting Abu Dhabi flights until the winter season. The carrier’s routing decisions were taken before this week’s US-Iran ceasefire announcement.
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Western airlines have seen a rise in demand for direct Asian travel as travellers avoid flights that connect through the Gulf airports, pushing up prices.
However, most airlines do not have spare aircraft because of long delays to deliveries from Boeing and Airbus, hampering efforts by European carriers to capitalise on the chaos in the global travel market.
The reduced schedule will see BA offer one flight a day to Dubai, down from three, and halve its flights to Doha, Riyadh and Tel Aviv to once daily.
The carrier’s Asian and African services will see a larger Airbus A350 plane on one flight to Delhi, replacing a Boeing 777 and creating an additional 59 seats. BA will also use a Boeing 777 rather than a 787 on one flight to Hyderabad, generating 68 more seats.
It will add daily flights to Bengaluru, Nairobi and Mumbai from the start of June, and three more weekly flights to Delhi.
“Due to the ongoing situation in the Middle East, we have made further changes to our flying schedule to provide greater clarity for our customers,” BA said.
“We’re keeping the situation under constant review and are directly in touch with affected customers to offer them a range of options.”
So far, Lufthansa has cancelled flights into Dubai and Tel Aviv until June, and the rest of the region until October. Air France and KLM have suspended services until May. Virgin Atlantic, which briefly restarted Dubai and Riyadh services within days of the conflict beginning, has also cancelled its services into Riyadh for the foreseeable future. - Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
