Emirates Ups London–Dubai Capacity

Emirates is poised to take delivery of another eight A380 aircraft this year, one of which will start operating between London Heathrow and Dubai from July 1. This will provide the carrier with 517 seats per aircraft (14 seated in first class, 76 in business class and 427 in economy). The A380 will replace a 777 with 354 seats (8F 42J 304Y) and will add an additional 1,141 seats per week in each direction, over 100,000 additional seats per year.

Salem Obaidalla, Emirates' senior vice president, operations (Europe & Russian Federation), says: "This is an important development for Emirates as this is the first route where we have made a long- term commitment to double up on the double-decker."

London-Dubai Schedule

Unsurprisingly, Emirates is the biggest operator on the London to Dubai sector (on the basis of scheduled weekly seat capacity). It faces competition on the route from British Airways, which operates twice daily, while Virgin offers a daily service and Royal Brunei and Biman Bangladesh both serve the route as double drop services - or extensions from their home bases. Of course, then there is also Emirates' major rivals, Etihad and Qatar, operating to their own hubs not far from Dubai in Abu Dhabi and Doha respectively.

Emirates also operates a thrice-weekly rotation to London Gatwick, which is more leisure focused than the London Heathrow segment.

The following scheduling data summarises the five carriers competing for traffic between Dubai and London Heathrow:

Source: Flightbase (June 14-20 2010)

According to IATA BSP data, over 950,000 O+D passengers flew between London Heathrow and Dubai between December 2008 and December 2009. Of this traffic, 89% was non-stop.

The data also shows that Emirates' market share has climbed from 40% during this period to 61%, while the second largest carrier, British Airways has increased its slice of the market from 20% to 24%. Last January, BA added five weekly frequencies to its schedule.

WHY A SECOND A380 ON THE ROUTE?

The introduction of a second A380 represents a sensible capacity increase for Emirates, avoiding the need to apply for a new slot at the heavily constrained, and comparatively more expensive airport.

The UK is Emirates' second largest market after India in terms of scheduld seat capacity, and there are limited UK airports that can accommodate the A380 with Manchester and London Gatwick not currently able to do so.

Significantly, Emirates will be able to scoop up more premium passengers, who make up a sizeable portion of overall demand on the route. Over 70,000 business passengers and 17,000 first class passengers travelled with Emirates between January 2009 and 2010 according to IATA BSP data.

Finally, Emirates will continue to progressively grow its network into the UK, where it offers 98 weekly departures from six destinations: London Heathrow, London Gatwick, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and Birmingham. The UK to Dubai, and London-Dubai route has grown steadily over previous years as the CAA data shows below