Britons frustrated at BA flight ban to Pakistan

Thousand of Britons are finding their holiday plans in jeopardy after British Airways halted flights to Islamabad, Pakistan following the devastating suicide bomb attack on a major hotel in the city last week.

Eid is the biggest holiday on the annual Muslim calendar, and marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. It is a time of family reunions and feasts, and sees thousands of British Pakistanis heading back to their homeland for celebrations.

This year, many travellers are being forced to change their travel plans by making connections through the Gulf states or elsewhere. The problem they are confronting, however, is that flights on alternate routes were fully booked as of Wednesday.

As political instability and bombings have risen in Pakistan, air passenger traffic has fallen steadily. According to Civil Aviation Authority statistics, 684,000 passengers travelled on direct flights to Pakistan from the UK last year, which was a decrease of 18,000 as compared with 2006.

Up until this week, carriers provided service to Pakistan from cities around the UK with large Pakistani populations, with regularly-schedule flights operating from Birmingham, Glasgow, Heathrow, Manchester, Nottingham East Midlands and Stansted.

Indirect services have not been disrupted. Emirates, for example, operates services from Birmingham, Glasgow and Newcastle to Dubai and then onward connections to Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar, in Pakistan.

www.britishairways.com