PAL flights to Riyadh resume in March
Posted on January 19th, 2010
The Philippine flag-carrier, the Philippine Airlines (PAL) will be resuming its service to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on March 28, 2010, after four years its absence in the said city. The PAL decided to bring back its flight to Riyadh in response to the clamor of more than two million Filipino Overseas Worker (OFW) communities in the Middle East.
The flight will be a non-stop service which will have a schedule of four times a week. Flight PR 658 will be departing from Manila every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday at 6:20 p.m. and it will arrive in the Saudi capital at 11:00 p.m. (Riyadh time), the airline said.
On the trip back home, it will be flight PR 659 which will departs Riyadh at 12:30 a.m. every Wednesday, Friday, Sunday and Monday, and arriving in Manila at 3:00 p.m., Manila time. Deployed on the service will be Boeing 747-400 aircraft, which seat 50 passengers in Mabuhay Class (business) and 383 in Fiesta Class (economy).
It was in March 2, 2006 where PAL served it last flight in Riyadh, its final destination in the Middle East. The airline company suspended the service for commercial reason. Now that PAL had resumed the service in Riyadh, OFWs who account for one of the largest foreign communities living in the Middle East, lauded the flag carriers for its decision.
Filipinos in the Middle East still preferred PAL over other airlines, because of its direct service to Manila, which means they can get home faster as compared with other carriers. Most of those flights can involve up to two stops in intermediate cities before finally proceeding to Manila.
