San Francisco is to become SWISS’s latest long-haul destination. The new service, which will be introduced on 2 June 2010, will bring one of North America’s most important business and leisure destinations into the SWISS network. The new flights will be operated using existing aircraft capacity, and will be added in parallel to frequency increases on routes to India, South America and Canada.

Thanks to its rigorous cost management and its ceaseless endeavours to enhance its efficiency, SWISS is one of the few air carriers which will be able to further expand their networks next year, too. From June 2010 onwards, Switzerland’s airline will provide a sixtimes- weekly service between Zurich and San Francisco, one of the most important and strongest-growing markets in the whole of North America. In adding San Francisco to our network, we are meeting a strong demand that we have heard and felt from many major companies and large numbers of leisure-travel customers.

The new SWISS San Francisco service will be operated with existing aircraft capacity. The two long-haul aircraft that have been temporarily withdrawn should be returned to service in spring 2010. As well as increasing frequencies to Delhi, Mumbai, São Paulo and Montreal, the additional capacity will be deployed on the new San Francisco route. SWISS is also making full use of the opportunities generated by its membership of the Lufthansa Group to revise its present four-times-weekly services to Riyadh and Jeddah.

In view of the current positioning of Lufthansa in offering daily direct flights to JED and RUH, Swiss will stop its own operation to the Kingdom and will replace the current 4 LX frequencies with daily code share services on Lufthansa via Frankfurt as per February 2nd, 2010.