British Airways has added another three new routes to its 2015 short-haul schedule and there are some changes to the service to Colombo and Malé.

British Airways has added another three new routes to its 2015 short-haul schedule. Seville in Spain, Funchal in Madeira and Las Palmas in Gran Canaria will all operate out of Gatwick from March 2015 and will be available to book from September 24.

Flying to more leisure destinations is an important element in the drive to return short-haul to profitability and meet the IAG deadline of delivering a £150m profit by end 2015.

Commenting on the announcement, Robin Glover-Faure, Head of Short-Haul, said: “By attracting more leisure customers we will grow our short-haul revenue, taking us another step closer to our target. While it has been necessary to have a discussion on cutting costs to deliver profitability we are also working hard on how we increase our fare income. In addition to the new routes we are also responding to customer demand and now offer our customers day-trip and hand baggage only fares.

“Our short-haul competitors have clearly taken note of our renewed challenge and have responded with some strong marketing of their own.”

The news follows announcements on eight other new Gatwick routes, taking the total number of destinations British Airways flies to from Gatwick to over 50 for Summer 2015.

From December this year, new winter sun and ski destinations will include Fuerteventura, Friedrichshafen and Grenoble. Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands will fly from December 13 this year and other routes launching for Summer 2015, will include Cagliari in Sardinia, Crete and Rhodes in Greece and Bodrum and Dalaman in Turkey. The services to all three destinations will be served by a mixture of A319 and A320 aircraft from Gatwick.

Colombo and Malé
In addition to announcing the new short-haul routes, British Airways is making changes to its services to Colombo, Sri Lanka and Malé, Maldives. These will run until March 28, 2015. Services to Malé will re-commence for Winter 2015, but services to Colombo will be cancelled.

Sri Lanka will still be served by recently-joined oneworld partner SriLankan Airlines, which offers direct flights from London to Colombo.