Five Minutes With Laurie Berryman, Vice President UK & Ireland, Emirates Airline
Emirates Airline has recently announced plans to expand in the African and European markets with new flights from Dubai International to Harare, Zimbabwe; Lusaka, Zambia; and Dublin, Ireland. Ahead of this year’s event The HUB grabbed a few quick words with Laurie Berryman, Vice President UK and Ireland of Emirates Airline…
Q) Can you give us a little background to the recent Dublin route launch?
A) Dublin has been on our radar for some time as a destination we wanted to serve. With many new aircraft entering the fleet in the months ahead, we will now have sufficient capacity to launch the route and give Irish travellers a non-stop service to Dubai and the benefit of our unrivalled onward network. We expect to carry a mix of leisure and business traffic, with a daily service crucial to attract the latter. We also expect to be carrying a large amount of VFR traffic both inbound and outbound.
Q) What are your aspirations for the route?
A) We want to drive the route to healthy load factors as soon as possible, and would hope to see passenger loads in the 80s before too long. We know there is a strong market for cargo from Dublin as we already carry substantial amounts of it over our UK departure points, and so believe we will be able to develop this further. Pharmaceuticals, which make up nearly a quarter of Ireland's exports, are expected to be amongst the commodities carried, along with electronics. It's premature to talk about aircraft upgrades at this point, but the logical progression for the route would be to introduce a larger Boeing 777 at a later date and we hope we can quickly drive demand to a point where this becomes a development we need to consider.
Q) Alongside O&D traffic which overseas markets will be key to supporting this route?
A) There are large numbers of Irish nationals living overseas such as approximately 80,000 in Australia, which will make the four destinations we serve there key onward routes for us. Other key markets beyond Dubai are predicted to include Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, India, South Africa, Hong Kong and New Zealand.
Q) You are operating a three-class Airbus A330 on the route. Do you expect a strong premium market?
A) We expect a strong demand in all classes, hence why we are putting a three class aircraft on the route from the outset.
Q) Can you give us an update of your wider UK strategy?
A) Our UK operations are performing well, with healthy loads on all routes thus far this year. Our third daily Manchester service which launched on May 1 has bedded in well and helping us achieve record passenger and cargo figures from Manchester. The Airbus A380 is proving popular with our passengers, and loads on our A380 services from London Heathrow and Manchester are strong. It is our intention to introduce further A380 flights from the UK in the future, but we don’t have any specific details at this point. Upgrading our Newcastle service to a Boeing 777 will be a natural next step for a route that is now well established and performing well. A lot depends on when we have a Boeing 777 available to operate on the route, but I would hope that will happen in the not too distant future.
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