Emirates to add more flights to USA, has ambitious growth plans in the coming years
Emirates, the world’s biggest international airlines plans to start serving the US cities of Dallas and Seattle from 2012 onwards.
As per the Bloomberg report, Emirates will begin daily services from Dubai to Dallas starting Feb. 2 and to Seattle from March 1 and may add cities including Atlanta,Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington very soon. The airline plans to serve these routes using an A380 of which it has placed an order of nearly 90 and intends to add more in the Dubai Airshow to be held in November this year.
The airline seems to be betting bigtime on the A380’s which will add nearly 45,000 seats to its network, it recently started the first scheduled flight to Africas with a regular flight to Johannesburg.
Even in the slowing economy the airline is considering a ramp up as it is expecting demand to stay consistent or increase in the near future. The airline had scaled down its initial US expansion after the September 11 attacks but now seems to be back in action to target major cities in the US and also look for code-share partners after Continental scrapped the earlier agreement between the two in 2009.
The only factor limiting their current growth is current capacity limitation at their current hub at the Dubai airport which is currently undergoing a massive expansion to meet the growing demand. What remains to be seen is that what strategy it will employ to handle such a rapid growth trajectory in terms of employee base, capital requirements and other external factors. All in all from a passenger point of view it seems to be a very good news as Emirates is known to offer one of the best products in the market along with the most competitive fares on its routes. Its high time now that the Airline companies in the US fastened their seatbelt and improved their product offerings else risk their market share being eaten up by carriers of the like of Emirates which have raised the bar in terms of quality offering and better price value for its consumers.
Whether the Emirates proposition will work well with Americans remains to be seen. Emirates coach seating in its 777s (still the bulk of the fleet) is 10 across rather than 9 on American carriers, which may be ok for slim people but fat people won’t like it, nor will slim people sitting next to fat people.
Their premium product is excellent but so many American companies won’t pay for premium and expect upgrades. Emirates don’t upgrade. So essentially they have a fundamentally different business model. AA, DL and UA have a model suited to Americans and get nearly all their business from Americans. I don’t see that changing and I don’t see Emirates picking up large chunks of business from Americans either, unless they find a major partner. If they do, they may well pick up some premium business but coach? No.
Emirates model is totally different from the the model employed by the US airlines, Emirates is dedicatedly long haul player and they have done really well with a five fold increase in their traffic with a really young fleet. The seat pitch that they offer in their planes is comparable to all the other airlines. The model used by other US airlines works well for their domestic operations and Emirates never intends to compete with them on that turf but if you see the passenger trend in the recent years more and more international traffic is actually moving to carriers outside the US specially the Asian and Middle East carriers and that is purely because they have a very superior product on offer compared to the US airlines and at a competitive pricing too. In my opinion this is the way to go for any airline to survive and Emirates demonstrates this very clearly by remaining profitable and agile to changing needs as ever.