Summary BA has removed all London Heathrow-Beijing flights from the end of October. Not overflying Russia, lower Chinese demand, and being unable to claim back VAT have contributed to the end. Paradoxically, so has overcapacity, with London-Beijing having a fifth more seats for sale than before the pandemic.
British Airways is ending Beijing flights. The carrier operates from London Heathrow to Beijing Daxing four times weekly, but flights are not bookable from London after October 24, near the end of the northern aviation summer season. It comes soon after Virgin Atlantic announced the end of its Heathrow to Shanghai Pudong route .
There is no indication that Beijing will become summer seasonal or what route will take up its Heathrow slots. No more BA flights to Beijing BA has served the Chinese capital for decades, but that will change soon. The route, which BA reinstalled in June 2023 after more than three years due to COVID, uses the Boeing 777-200ER.
Flights leave the UK on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Beijing really must have underperformed. After all, BA will continue to fly to other East Asian cities that must avoid Russia, among them Shanghai, although that market will benefit from better loads, fares, and yields from Virgin ending it.
China Southern serves Heathrow-Daxing daily, which it introduced in 2023. It is a BA partner and the pair codeshare. BA passengers can also connect to/from Beijing with one world and close partner Qatar Airways over its Doha hub.
Why is it happening? The same problems that afflicted Virgin's Shanghai end are crucial in BA's Beijing cessation. It's hard to imagine that BA said Beijing was "one of our most important routes" a year ago. While that comment could have been related to political or 'visibility' considerations, times and decisions change.
The situation was not helped by being unable to overfly Russia, which meant longer trips, higher fuel burn, higher sector costs, greater aircraft use for the route, lower staff productivity, etc. Now, BA's block time to Beijing is 11h 30m. In August 2019, when it could fly over Russia, it was 10h 05m.
Why take the risk, especially when Chinese demand is also not where it was, not helped by the inability to claim back VAT on luxury and other goods? As always, it is about what else could be done with the aircraft and slots. Logic suggests that BA should fly its assets elsewhere, perhaps especially to the US, which is its core strength. How many of them can you name? There is also overcapacity It is also worth seeing how the number of London-Beijing city-level flights changed from August 2019, before the pandemic, to August 2024.
This is based on analyzing schedules using Cirium data. Despite arguments about lower Chinese demand, non-stop weekly departures have risen from 28 in August 2019 to 32 now. That's a 14% increase, although the absolute weekly change does not appear much.
More importantly, 1,600+ additional weekly seats are for sale each way, up by a fifth. It is from larger-capacity equipment. Find Beijing flights here! Five years ago, two routes existed: BA and Air China from Heathrow and Beijing.
Now, there are four. Air China runs from Gatwick and Heathrow to Beijing Capital, while BA and China Southern operate from Heathrow to Daxing. The many consequences of overcapacity undoubtedly impact BA's decision to pull out.
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