Another Reason to Love Colorado-Nonstop service to Iceland! Icelandair to offer daily DIA service next summer Buoyed by the exponential growth of people traveling from Denver to Reykjavik, Icelandair will expand its nonstop summer service between the cities to seven days a week, beginning in June. The route — one of three nonstop flights from Denver International Airport to Europe — launched in May 2012 initially flying four days a week, but it expanded to six days a week this past summer. And on Wednesday night, Bergthora Laxdal, the cultural representative to the Icelandic consulate in New York, confirmed during a preview event for this week’s “Taste of Iceland” festivities in Colorado that the service will go daily next summer. The daily service will launch on June 4 and will extend to Sept. 4, said Laura Jackson, DIA senior director of air service development and aviation research. The nonstop flight schedule will remain at four days per week for the rest of the year, she said. Icelandair officials decided to invest in the expanded schedule because the flight has been so popular. In 2011, before there was a direct link between the cities, just 400 people traveled from Denver to Reykjavik or vice versa. Between August 2012 and July 2013, roughly 19,000 went from one of the cities to the other — a number that does not include anyone who began in Denver or Reykjavik and used the route simply as a connecting point to other locations on the respective continents, she said. “It’s great news that they’re continuing to grow,” Jackson said Thursday. “Daily flights generally are more reliable. People know they can go any day of the week.” The Icelandair flight was the first of three major nonstop international routes launched in a 13-month period from DIA, preceding a Volaris flight to Mexico City and a United Airlines flight to Tokyo. It joined a British Airways flight to London and a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, Germany, as the only direct flights to Europe from the airport. Jackson and Laxdal said anecdotal evidence points to most of the passengers on the route being leisure, rather than business, travelers so far. The flights are far more picked in the summer in the summer, with load factors on the planes being 90 percent or higher throughout most of the 2013 peak season, then they are in the colder months, when load factors dipped to 67 to 70 percent in the late fall, Jackson said. In addition, the flights to Reykjavik have offered a more direct connection for Denverites to Scandanavia. A study Jackson did after the first 12 months of the route showed that Icelandair has become the top ticketing company for DIA passengers whose final destinations are Stockholm, Sweden, or Copenhagen, Denmark. Now that the airline has made the commitment to go daily during the peak season, DIA officials will work with them next to see if they can increase the frequency of flights in the winter or if they can add more than one flight a day if the passenger numbers continue to rise, Jackson said. The increased frequency may also make other carriers think about launching direct flights to DIA from other European cities, she said. Icelandic officials are in town this week trying to stir up even more interest in their island nation. Beginning tonight and running through Sunday, Coohills, 1400 Wewatta St., will offer nightly food pairings of Icelandic food, including Arctic char and langoustine, cooked by guest chef Thrainn Freyr Vigfusson. The event, in its second year at the LoDo restaurant, is attracting significant interest among diners, owner Diane Coohill said. There also will be a concert of Icelandic music at Denver’s 3 Kings Tavern, 60 S. Broadway, on Saturday night. “There’s a lot of people that come to the event that are going to Iceland or who have been to Iceland,” Vigfusson said, showing off his signature bread baked in milk cartons in steam vents in his home country. “And a few are just curious.”
Posted on: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 23:18:26 +0000