flydubai Pokhara Launch: Dubai Flights Start September 23

flydubai Boeing 737-800 aircraft, the type that will serve the new Dubai-Pokhara route. Photo: Mohammadreza Farhadi Aref, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Yes, Pokhara finally has a regular international airline link. flydubai’s Dubai-Pokhara service begins on Wednesday 23 September 2026, when flight FZ 1165 is scheduled to land at Pokhara International Airport (PHH) at 18:15 local time. The aircraft then turns around and departs for Dubai as FZ 1166 at 19:15 the same evening. The airline plans to fly the route daily, and as of 15 September 2026 bookings are open through 26 March 2027. The launch makes flydubai the first carrier from the United Arab Emirates to serve Pokhara, and it gives trekkers heading to the Annapurna region a genuine second international gateway into Nepal.

The news broke on 14 September when Pokhara International Airport’s information officer published the arrival-departure timetable, as Online Khabar reported in Nepali. It confirms what flydubai itself announced back in June: a daily service from Terminal 3 at Dubai International, operated under a codeshare partnership with Emirates. For a city that has waited more than three years for its purpose-built international airport to earn its name, this is the biggest aviation story since the airport opened on 1 January 2023.

Table of contents

• What is confirmed so far
• Flight schedule and fares
• A first for Pokhara International Airport
• What it means for trekkers and the Annapurna region
• One-ticket connections beyond Dubai
• September context: roads, runways and the autumn season
• Arriving at Pokhara: practical notes
• Will it last? The Lhasa precedent
• FAQ
• Sources

What is confirmed so far

As with any new route, it is worth separating what the airline and the airport authority have committed to from what remains hopeful expectation. Here is the status of each key detail as of 15 September 2026:

Detail	Status	Source
First flight lands at Pokhara on 23 September 2026 at 18:15	CONFIRMED	flydubai timetable; airport information officer quoted by Online Khabar
Daily operation from 23 September onward	CONFIRMED	flydubai announcement; Online Khabar; ShareSansar
Emirates codeshare with single-ticket connections	CONFIRMED	flydubai announcement, June 2026
Bookings open through 26 March 2027	CONFIRMED (as reported)	Online Khabar; ShareSansar
Boeing 737 family aircraft on the route	CONFIRMED	flydubai fleet information (the airline operates only Boeing 737s)
Visa-on-arrival facilities at PHH matching Kathmandu airport	NOT CONFIRMED	Confirm with the Department of Immigration before booking

Two Nepali outlets carried the 14 September schedule announcement, and both square with the airline’s own materials. Online Khabar, citing airport information officer Binod Singh Rawat, reported that the evening arrival and departure slots will run every day, with the first-day landing possibly a few minutes ahead of schedule. ShareSansar, publishing the same evening, added that the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal granted the route approval and that bookings are reportedly open until 26 March 2027.

Flight schedule and fares

The published timetable is straightforward, with one arrival and one departure each day. All times below are local, as published by flydubai:

Flight	Route	Departs	Arrives
FZ 1165	Dubai (DXB), Terminal 3, to Pokhara (PHH)	12:00	18:15
FZ 1166	Pokhara (PHH) to Dubai (DXB), Terminal 3	19:15	22:00

The evening layout matters. The aircraft is on the ground in Pokhara for just one hour between arrival and departure, which keeps the aircraft earning money for the airline but also means the Pokhara departure feeds conveniently into Dubai’s late-night wave of long-haul connections. Travelers booking from the Nepal side should note that this is a night flight into Dubai, landing at 22:00 local time.

Fare details come from flydubai’s June 2026 announcement, which carried a full price table for the new route:

• From Dubai (return): Business Class from AED 5,000; Economy Class Lite from AED 1,900.
• From Pokhara (return): Business Class from NPR 190,000; Economy Class Lite from NPR 91,000.

Starting fares move with demand, so treat these as launch prices rather than permanent ones. Navaraj Shahi, flydubai’s general manager for Nepal, told Online Khabar that tickets on the Pokhara service would sell up to Rs 5,000 cheaper than equivalent departures from Kathmandu. That claim is the airline’s own and was reported by Online Khabar on 14 September; if it holds in practice, it strengthens the case for routing a Nepal trip through Pokhara rather than the capital.

A first for Pokhara International Airport

To understand why a single daily flight is front-page news in Nepal, it helps to know how long Pokhara waited for it. The idea of an international airport at Pokhara was first proposed in 1971, and the government acquired land for the project in 1976, according to the airport’s Wikipedia record. A Japanese feasibility study followed in 1989, but the project stalled for decades until a 2009 air services agreement with India revived it. Construction by China CAMC Engineering began in April 2016, and the airport finally opened on 1 January 2023 as Nepal’s third international gateway, after Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport and the Gautam Buddha International Airport at Bhairahawa.

Then came the awkward part. For more than three years after opening, Pokhara International Airport handled domestic flights and the occasional charter, but no regular scheduled international service. Nepal’s carrier Himalaya Airlines did launch a Pokhara-Lhasa commercial route in March 2025, but that service was later suspended due to low passenger numbers, as Online Khabar noted in its 14 September report. Charter flights to destinations in China, India and Bhutan came and went. An airport built to relieve pressure from Kathmandu was, in practice, waiting for an airline willing to commit.

flydubai is that airline. The carrier has served Kathmandu since 2009, carried roughly four million passengers on the route over 17 years, and scaled up to five daily Kathmandu flights during peak periods. Its seat capacity to Nepal has grown more than twelvefold since it entered the market, according to the airline’s own announcement. Pokhara becomes its second Nepali destination, and the first regular international route Pokhara International Airport has ever had.

What it means for trekkers and the Annapurna region

For trekking travelers, the practical change is simple: if your home airport connects to Dubai, you can now fly straight into the heart of Nepal’s most popular trekking region without transiting Kathmandu at all. Pokhara is the staging town for the Annapurna Circuit, Annapurna Base Camp, Mardi Himal, Poon Hill and, one long drive or jeep ride to the north, the Manaslu Circuit. Our complete Annapurna region guide covers those routes in detail.

Until now, almost everyone entered through Kathmandu and then faced a choice: a domestic flight to Pokhara, or the 174 km drive along the Prithvi Highway. This September, that highway has been anything but reliable, with the Krishnabhir landslide closure disrupting traffic since early in the month before a trial run finally put vehicles across the repaired section on 13 September. Landing at Pokhara sidesteps the highway question entirely, at least for the Pokhara leg of a trip.

Two caveats for autumn trekkers. First, if your itinerary targets the Manaslu Circuit or the northern Annapurna Circuit trailheads, the road from Besisahar toward Chame has been closed by flood damage, as we reported in our Besisahar-Chame road closure story, so verify current access conditions with your operator before finalising plans. Second, the evening arrival time means the sensible pattern is a night in a Pokhara hotel and an onward start the following morning, which suits most trek itineraries anyway. For the broader picture of the autumn season, our autumn climbing and trekking season outlook covers conditions and permits.

One-ticket connections beyond Dubai

The strategic core of the route is the codeshare with Emirates. Under the partnership, a traveler can buy a single ticket that starts in Pokhara, rides flydubai to Dubai, and continues on an Emirates aircraft toward Europe, Australia, the Americas or Africa, with baggage checked through the whole way. Both carriers operate from Terminal 3 at Dubai International, which makes the transfer unusually smooth by codeshare standards.

The scale on offer is significant. flydubai’s own network spans more than 125 destinations in 56 countries, while Emirates serves more than 143 destinations across 76 countries on six continents, as Online Khabar’s report noted. Sudhir Sreedharan, flydubai’s Divisional Senior Vice President of Commercial Operations, said in the airline’s announcement that the route is positioned to serve demand from the UAE, the wider Gulf region, the Middle East and Europe, along with connections through the airline’s interline partners.

For the Nepali diaspora in the Gulf and for European travelers who previously had to route through Kathmandu, that is a structural improvement. Ghaith Al Ghaith, flydubai’s Chief Executive Officer, framed the launch as leveraging Dubai’s position as a world-class hub to open new avenues of accessibility for business and leisure travelers to Nepal. Tourism officials in Pokhara are making essentially the same argument in plainer language: bring the international network to the tourists instead of making every tourist pass through the capital.

September context: roads, runways and the autumn season

The launch lands amid a strange, turbulent month for Nepal travel. On the roads, the Prithvi Highway’s Krishnabhir collapse severed the main Kathmandu-Pokhara artery for nearly two weeks, pushing travelers onto diversion routes and complicating the already tricky Narayangadh-Mugling section. In the air, airlines adjusted quickly: Buddha Air resumed its Nepalgunj-Pokhara domestic link, as we covered in our Buddha Air resumption report, and flights between Bharatpur and Kathmandu doubled as road travelers switched to the sky.

Pokhara’s tourism economy has felt the month directly, with tourist buses idling even as flight traffic surged, a pattern we documented in our Pokhara transport shift story. Against that backdrop, a daily international flight is the single clearest piece of good news the lakeside city has received all season. Hari Bhujel, chair of the Pokhara Tourism Council, told Online Khabar that the country’s tourism sector takes direct benefit from connecting the tourist capital to the international air network, and that local tourism businesses intend to work together to make the route succeed.

Santosh Paudel, an executive member of the Nepal Tourism Board, struck a similar note of shared responsibility, saying that flydubai has come to Pokhara trusting the city and that everyone involved must support the route from their own positions. Pokhara Metropolitan City and flydubai have also reached an understanding on continued cooperation in tourism promotion, destination marketing and expanding international air connectivity, according to the same report. You can read the earlier diplomatic groundwork in our August coverage of the Pokhara-Dubai flight discussions, when the UAE ambassador met Gandaki Province tourism leaders to push the project forward.

Arriving at Pokhara: practical notes

Pokhara International Airport sits at Chhinedanda, about 3 km east of the old domestic airport it largely replaced, which puts it a short drive from the Lakeside tourist quarter. Arriving in the evening at 18:15, most travelers will reach a hotel before dark. A few practical points are worth flagging:

• Visas: Nepal’s eVisa can be arranged online before departure, which is the safest route for a new international entry point. Whether visa-on-arrival facilities at PHH will immediately match the full range offered at Kathmandu’s airport had not been confirmed as of publication, so travelers who would normally rely on visa on arrival should check with the Department of Immigration or their airline before flying.
• Onward domestic flights: scheduled domestic services operate from the new airport, while the short takeoff and landing flights to Jomsom, the gateway to the Upper Mustang and Muktinath area, continue to use the old airport nearby.
• Booking channels: flydubai lists its website, mobile app, UAE contact centre, travel shops and partner travel agents as official booking channels for the route.
• Timing: with the 19:15 departure from Pokhara, don’t plan a same-day trek-end departure from the trailhead; the geometry only works with a final night in the city.

For travelers weighing whole-trip routing, our guide to getting to Nepal in 2026 compares the international gateways, and the Pokhara option now belongs in that conversation rather than beside it.

Will it last? The Lhasa precedent

Honesty requires acknowledging the risk. The only previous commercial international route from Pokhara, Himalaya Airlines’ Pokhara-Lhasa service launched in March 2025, was suspended after passenger numbers stayed too low. An airport can be technically international and still fail to fill seats if demand, pricing and marketing are not aligned. Three years of waiting for a regular carrier made that point painfully clear.

What is different this time? First, frequency: the Lhasa route was a modest operation, whereas flydubai has scheduled a daily service and opened bookings eight months out, through 26 March 2027. Second, connectivity: a standalone route sells one destination, but an Emirates codeshare sells the entire combined network in a single purchase, which massively widens the pool of potential passengers beyond point-to-point Gulf traffic. Third, price positioning: if the reported advantage over Kathmandu fares holds, the route has a concrete reason to draw traffic rather than merely goodwill.

Officials are publicly aware of the fragility. The Nepal Tourism Board’s Paudel explicitly framed the launch’s challenges as something to convert into opportunity, and the city’s tourism council has committed to unified promotion. The airport’s own representatives have said preparations were accelerated once the timetable was published. None of that guarantees success, but the structural fundamentals here are stronger than anything Pokhara International Airport has previously had to work with, and the route’s first weeks this autumn will offer the first real evidence either way.

FAQ

When does the first flydubai flight land in Pokhara?

The first scheduled arrival is flight FZ 1165, landing at Pokhara International Airport at 18:15 local time on Wednesday 23 September 2026. The airport’s information officer indicated the first-day landing could even run a few minutes early. The same aircraft departs for Dubai as FZ 1166 at 19:15.

How much do tickets cost?

Per flydubai’s June 2026 announcement, starting return fares are AED 5,000 in Business Class and AED 1,900 in Economy Lite from the Dubai side, and NPR 190,000 in Business Class and NPR 91,000 in Economy Lite from the Pokhara side. The airline’s Nepal general manager said Pokhara tickets would sell up to Rs 5,000 cheaper than equivalent Kathmandu departures, as reported by Online Khabar.

Can I fly from Pokhara to Europe or America on one ticket?

Yes, through the flydubai-Emirates codeshare. You buy a single ticket, check baggage through, and connect at Dubai’s Terminal 3 onto Emirates’ network of more than 143 destinations in 76 countries. Both airlines operate from the same terminal.

Is this Pokhara airport’s first international flight?

It is the first regular scheduled international service. Himalaya Airlines operated a Pokhara-Lhasa commercial route from March 2025 until it was suspended for low passenger numbers, and the airport has handled international charter flights to China, India and Bhutan. Daily flydubai service is the first sustained international operation.

Should trekkers change their travel plans?

If your routing naturally passes through Dubai, flying directly into Pokhara saves the Kathmandu transfer and lands you beside the Annapurna trailheads. Check current road conditions for your specific trek first, especially the Besisahar-Chame stretch for Manaslu and northern Annapurna Circuit access, and note that the evening arrival makes a first night in Pokhara the practical pattern.

Sources

• Online Khabar, 14 September 2026 (Nepali language): Direct Pokhara-Dubai flights from the first week of Asoj
• flydubai press release, 11 June 2026: flydubai announces new daily service to Pokhara
• ShareSansar, 14 September 2026: Flydubai to begin regular Dubai-Pokhara flights from September 23
• Wikipedia: Pokhara International Airport

Published 15 September 2026. Flight schedules and fares are as announced by the airline and airport as of publication; verify current details with flydubai before booking.