SriLankan Airlines in a statement said. “While the airline has already achieved a significant improvement in its financial performance for the current financial year, it is of the view that these commercially driven initiatives will help the airline to further improve the financial performance in the near term while continuing to deliver affordable travel options to its customers. On the instructions of the minister, in the medium term, the airline is also critically reviewing its entire route network, again with a view to being more commercially and bottom-line focused.”

The immediate schedule changes which will see the airline rationalising its scheduled operations to and via the MRIA and enhancing capacity to other high demand Middle East destinations, while reducing capacity to under performing routes such as Moscow. This translates to an annual bottom line improvement of approximately USD18 million.