Air Service One – Bitesize Analysis of the Day – 23rd April 2026 – British Airways at London LHR: route evolution

British Airways launched two very different new routes this week from Heathrow Airport. On 19 April the UK flag-carrier began daily service to the island of Guernsey (a 274-kilometre route) and also 4-weekly service to St. Louis in the US (a 6,761-kilometre route).

Another new route to Tivat in Montenegro is set to start in May, while service to Orlando in Florida will resume in July (last served in 2022). A fifth new route for this summer is Dallas/Fort Worth which resumed last winter after having been dropped from the schedules last summer.

According to analysis by AIR SERVICE ONE using Cirium schedules data, this is the fewest number of new routes launched by British Airways in a summer season for well over a decade (ignoring the Covid and subsequent service resumption period).

In contrast, BA will not be serving 10 destinations this summer that it did serve last summer, based on current schedule data. This figure could go up (or down) depending on geopolitical developments and the price of aviation fuel. The 10 destinations are: Amman, Bahrain, Bilbao (though just 10 flights in S25, all for football fans attending the UEFA Europa League Final between English clubs Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United on 21 May 2025 in Bilbao), Cologne Bonn (launched October 2023), Istanbul SAW (launched June 2023), Izmir (launched May 2024), Jeddah, Kalamata (launched in S16), Riga (launched October 2023) and Stuttgart. The three Middle East destinations may return in due course.

Between 2011 and 2017, British Airways launched three times more routes from Heathrow than it dropped (68 versus 20). In recent years the number of new and dropped routes has been rather more similar.