Qatar Airways chief executive officer Akbar Al Baker says the airline will upgrade its services to Mumbai, Kochi and Hyderabad, ahead of the busy Christmas/New Year period. "We''re pleased that we can now offer daily flights to Mumbai, Kochi and Hyderabad, in line with our current daily service to the southern Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram.

"These additional flights will allow us to increase our service levels to India and the large Indian expatriate community that resides in the Gulf, particularly during this busy holiday season. In the case of Kochi and Hyderabad, we have increased the number of flights per week from three to seven. For Mumbai, we have added one extra flight per week, to make it daily. We can now offer people 28 flights per week to four destinations in India."

In addition to increasing flight frequencies to India, Qatar Airways has also recently added four new destinations — Shanghai, Seoul, Tripoli and Vienna — in the last two months, and will be starting a service to Singapore and Cebu on 10 December. This will bring the total number of destinations serviced by Qatar Airways to 48 cities in 33 countries, a number that will increase to 60 destinations by 2005.