Air China opens Venice-Beijing: 4 flights a week from July 2026

Air China puts on sale the New direct route between Beijing Capital and Venice Marco Polo, operating from July 2, 2026. It is a route that until now did not exist in nonstop form and fills a definite hole: the direct connection between the Northeast and the Chinese capital.

Not a random choice at all given the current lack of a direct route from the Northeast to the Chinese capital.

Direct flight Venice Beijing: the details

The route will be operated 4 times a week with Airbus A330-200, configuration with 18 business places e 247 of economy. Little choice in business, no premium economy, 2-4-2 configuration in economy... In short, it could have been better. Clearly, an Airbus A350 like the one available for Malpensa would have been more convenient, but it would also have been quite complex to fill a larger 10% craft.

Flights on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, with rather convenient hours: Departure from Beijing at 2:15 p.m. with arrival in Venice at 7:15 p.m., Return from Venice at 9:30 p.m. with arrival in Beijing the next day at 1:30 p.m., for a total of about 10h of travel time. In this way, the flight remains usable for domestic connections in China and maintaining an evening departure from Italy allows the day not to be "wasted."

And if the schedules don't convince you, remember that we are talking about a direct route to one's main hub: it means Immediate access to China's domestic and regional network without passing through intermediate European hubs.

The shortest way to the east

Venice is not starting from scratch, and the flight to Beijing fits on this basis, changing the type of access: not just a destination, but a hub with a much larger domestic and regional network.

This is a second direct link, which follows The one on Shanghai activated a year and a half ago with immediately successful results and steadily increasing flows, resulting in a gradual increase in weekly frequencies, reaching an average load factor of 85% - Enrico Marchi, president of the Save Group

Air China today already sells routes from Venice to China (including Beijing) using partners and an intermediate stop, so the connection itself is nothing new. The difference is in the way it is operated: direct completely eliminates going through European hubs, getting coincidences, downtime and all the uncertainty that accumulates along the journey out of the way.

Added to this is a less immediate but decisive advantage: operating on routes that can cross Russian airspace, Air China manages to maintain more direct trajectories compared with many European carriers. The result is a Concrete reduction in overall time, which on these routes can drop from more than 14-15 hours with a stopover to about 10-11 hours on a nonstop, simply because you fly more "straight" as well as nonstop.

A move consistent with the current stage of the market

Traffic between Italy and China is increasing, but with a different structure than pre-2020. More fragmented, less concentrated on a few gateways, more tied to specific flows (organized tourism, targeted business, institutional traffic).

In this context, a direct Beijing-Venice makes sense to attract tourist and business basin from an area of Italy that would otherwise require at least 2h internal travel to reach more covered airports.

• New Routes