Royal Jordanian has announced it will stop flying to Brussels, Munich and Al Ain in the UAE in the next couple of months as well as two other Gulf destinations, which will be announced at a later time.
Attributing the decision to soaring fuel prices and decline in visitors following the Arab spring - particularly from Europe - it marks one of the most significant cost-cutting moves by a major regional airline to date.
The airline's president and CEO Hussein Dabbas said the airline has also decided to reduce the number of frequencies to Rome, Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Amsterdam, Colombo and Khartoum. The airline has been forced to cancel over 460 flights in the first three months of this year.
The company said it will cancel more flights during this year, to be decided by the amount of bookings to certain destinations, and will reconsider its fleet size. No new staff will be employed in 2012.
Dabbas stressed the measures "will not affect in any way the level of services provided to passengers", although given the scale of the cuts, that remains to be seen.
Other stations that have experienced a noticeable decline in traffic include Tunis, Damascus, Aleppo, Sana’a, Aden, Bahrain, Cairo, Alexandria and Sharm El Sheikh, "translating in the loss of hundreds of thousands of passengers".