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Qatar Airways adds Las Vegas to list of 11 US destinations

Qatar Airways will launch service between Las Vegas and Doha, Qatar, sometime within the next two years, but details were still fuzzy on the carrier’s frequency of flights out of McCarran International Airport.

Las Vegas and seven other cities will be added to the Middle East carrier’s schedule through 2017 and 2018, an airline spokeswoman said Monday. Additional destinations named were Canberra, Australia; Dublin, Ireland; Medan, Indonesia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Santiago, Chile; and the cities of Tabuk and Yanbu in Saudi Arabia.

Las Vegas will become the 11th city in the United States served by Qatar Airways.

An airline spokeswoman said that she could not comment on when service would start at McCarran International, nor how often the carrier would fly into Las Vegas.

It was also unclear what type of aircraft would fly into Las Vegas. Qatar Airways serves more than 150 destinations around the world with a fleet of Boeing 777 and Dreamliner jetliners, along with every model of Airbus planes.

“With today’s network announcement, we will be able to connect more people to more places than any other Gulf airline, and we will ensure our passengers will delight in the journey,” Akbar Al Baker, chief executive of Qatar Airways Group, said in a prepared statement. “At Qatar Airways, we are going places together with our passengers, and we look forward to welcoming these new destinations in 2017.”

Airport officials declined to comment about the new service.

Jeremy Handel, a spokesman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said that new service to international destinations — including the new route to Beijing scheduled to start later this week aboard Hainan Airlines — is vital to growing the local tourism market.

“We are always working with McCarran to bring in more service from more destinations and international visitation is a key growth market for us, so we will continue to work with carriers to open new routes to Las Vegas,” Handel said.

Contact Art Marroquin at amarroquin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0336. Find @AMarroquin_LV on Twitter.

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