Welcome aboard, and thank you for choosing Continental Airlines for your flight today.

We are proud to offer our customers more than 3,100 daily departures* to 144 domestic and 138 international destinations — more international destinations than any other U.S. carrier.

This month, our route map gets even stronger as we begin flights to what is arguably Europe’s most important business airport: London Heathrow. We are launching twice-a-day service from our hubs in both New York/Newark and Houston to Heathrow. You’ve been telling us for years that access to Heathrow is important to you, and I’m so pleased that we’ll now be able to offer our award-winning product and service to that destination.

In addition to the new Heathrow service, we will continue our twice-a-day service to London Gatwick from Newark Liberty International Airport, our New York area hub, and once-a-day service from our Houston hub. We also will continue our seasonal summer service between our Cleveland hub and London Gatwick. (For more about London, see “The Real City.”)

Also on the horizon is new service between Paris and Cleveland, starting later this year, and new service between the New York area and Shanghai, beginning in March 2009.

Our global route network is the result of more than a decade of careful strategic planning and investing in resources like our fleet and facilities, including our Global Gateway at Newark Liberty.

Over the past few years, we’ve launched service to some of the hottest up-and-coming business destinations on the globe, like Beijing, Mumbai, and Delhi. Using our winglet-equipped Boeing 757 aircraft, we’ve made nonstop service possible between the New York area and European cities like Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Stockholm. We have added more flights to some of our most popular destinations, like Amsterdam and Paris. And we’ve expanded our presence in Mexico; Continental now serves more destinations in Mexico from the U.S. than any other carrier.

We continue to be the strongest carrier operating in the New York area, with more nonstop destinations, more weekly seats, and more weekly flights from that region than any other carrier — including more nonstop flights from the Big Apple to Europe.

Our international expansion won’t stop there. We will continue to focus on adding destinations and frequencies based on feedback from our customers. But no matter where you travel, we strive to provide you with consistently excellent service. I know we can do that because of the professionalism of my more than 45,000 co-workers located all across the globe, including this month’s Employee of the Month, International Airport Business Manager Santiago Cappanera, based in Buenos Aires. You can read more about him here.

On behalf of Santiago and the entire Continental team, thanks again for your business. We look forward to serving you again soon.

Larry Kellner
Chairman and CEO
Continental Airlines