El Al Reaches for Asia With Hanoi, Seoul and Manila Routes

El Al, Israel's flag carrier, said on Sunday 8 February 2026 that it would add nine new destinations to its network over 2026 and 2027. Three are long-haul Asian cities (Hanoi, Seoul and Manila), each to be served by three flights a week.

The remaining six will be flown by Sun d'Or, El Al's leisure subsidiary, to Catania in Sicily, Cagliari in Sardinia, Basel in Switzerland, Zagreb and Dubrovnik in Croatia, and Copenhagen. El Al said the expansion was intended to strengthen tourism, business travel and economic ties, particularly with Asia, and that once fully implemented it expected to operate around 60 direct destinations and roughly 900 weekly flights worldwide.

An airline coming out of a monopoly

The announcement lands at the end of an unusual period for Israeli aviation. Through much of the war most foreign carriers stopped flying to Tel Aviv, leaving El Al and the smaller Israeli airlines with a near-monopoly on the routes in and out of the country. The Times of Israel reported in October 2025 that El Al's share price had risen more than 60 per cent over the year before falling back as investors anticipated the return of competition, and that round-trip fares between Tel Aviv and New York had roughly halved as carriers including Air Canada, British Airways, Iberia, United and Delta resumed service.

Expanding the map is one answer to that. Adding Hanoi, Seoul and Manila puts El Al into markets where it has no incumbent competitor to undercut it, and where the traffic mix (business travel, labour migration and connecting tourism) is different from the diaspora and leisure routes to North America and Europe that dominate its existing network.

The market it is expanding into has been recovering fast. About 18.4 million passengers passed through Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv on international flights in 2025, a rise of roughly a third on 2024, with around 60 foreign carriers operating there over the year, Xinhua reported in December 2025, and Israeli airlines together carried more than half of all passengers.

What Sun d'Or is for

Sun d'Or operates as El Al's lower-cost leisure arm, flying holiday routes that would not support a full-service schedule. The six European cities on its list are seasonal-leisure destinations rather than business hubs, and Ynetnews reported that the Copenhagen route marks El Al's return to the Danish capital for the first time since 2001. Ynetnews's account of the announcement matched the carrier's own on the nine destinations, the three-times-weekly Asian frequencies, and the targets of roughly 60 destinations and 900 weekly flights.

What the announcement did not say

El Al gave no start dates for any of the nine routes, no fares, and no indication of which aircraft would fly them. It did not say whether the Asian services depend on overflight rights or on regulatory approvals still outstanding, nor how the new destinations sit against the roughly 60-route target: that is, how many existing routes the plan assumes will still be running when the last of the nine launches.