Among those attending the Mobile World Congress, before the pandemic, there were thousands of professionals who came from Shenzhen, a gigantic metropolis considered the technological capital of China. After several years of absence due to travel restrictions due to covid, the congress organizers hope to recover the Asian presence in the next edition as in the old days, when there were more than 100,000 attendees every last week of February at the fairgrounds in l'Hospitalet.
The launch of the direct air connection between Barcelona and Shenzhen, which opened yesterday at the El Prat airport, will be essential for this. Operated by Shenzhen Airlines with an Airbus A330, it will have two weekly flights at first, with the intention of expanding to three from February next year.
The incorporation of this connection to the intercontinental routes of El Prat supposes the recovery of the connection with China, which was lost due to the pandemic border closure of 2020. Before that, 433,492 annual passengers flew between Barcelona and China, either by stopping or on Air China's direct flights to Beijing, which recovered last June after three years of interruption.
Shenzhen Airlines has been flying within China and surrounding countries for years, but until now it only reached London in Europe. Integrated within the Air China group, the Chinese flag carrier's commitment to the Catalan capital is thus consolidated and responds to one of the objectives on which the Barcelona Air Route Development Committee (CDRA) has focused, whose strategic plan has Asia in focus. To demonstrate the importance of the moment, the first plane to arrive from Shenzhen was received by the Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, together with the acting Consul General of China in Barcelona, Hu Aimin, and the vice president of the airline, Zhou Zhiwei.
The mayor of Shenzhen, Qin Weizhong, participated in the event through a recorded video, in which he defined the new route as "a starting point to deepen collaboration" between the two cities, twinned for two decades, before that Barcelona hold one of the largest technological congresses in the world in its city and bet decisively on technology and innovation as the axis of economic development.
The managers of the company have highlighted that they have programmed the flight schedules with business passengers in mind, since the flight that leaves from the runways located next to the Llobregat delta arrives at the airport located in the Pearl River delta at seven o'clock in the morning. In this way, it seeks to offer the largest possible number of national and international connections from the infrastructure located next to the city where all the large technology companies are based. Even so, the president of Turisme de Barcelona, Eduard Torres, points out that "this flight would not be profitable only with business", which is why he defends "the combination of tourism and economy to be competitive at an international level".
In this sense, Collboni has defined the new route as "a new channel of opportunities" and has taken the opportunity to urge "to work to have an airport that makes possible the growth of direct intercontinental flights", alluding to the debate on the expansion that The Generalitat and the Government have yet to address, with several proposals for the extension of tracks on the table.
