22,000 a month use Emirate’s Dublin to Dubai service

Emirates has carried more than 1m passengers on the airline’s Dublin to Dubai services and beyond in the four years since it first took off from Ireland.

The provision of a second daily service out of Dublin last year has been mainly responsible for the major boost in traffic and the airline now boasts an impressively high passenger load factor of more than 85%.

Irish manager Enda Corneille was in Cork yesterday and said there was a significant contribution in traffic numbers from the Munster region following the appointment of a dedicated sales executive for the region, Clare’s Helena Sweeney.

“When we started operations out of Ireland in 2012, it was just a single flight a day until we increased that to two services from September of last year,” said Mr Corneille. “We’re now looking at 22,000 passengers a month and we passed the million mark in the last couple of weeks. Over the year, about 20% of our passengers stop off in Dubai, but the rest go on. Australia is our biggest market, the likes of Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. They would be in our top 10, but we also do big business into India, the Philippines, China, and Thailand

“Increasingly, in the last couple of months, we notice a lot of bookings to Africa, to Capetown and Johannesburg and a little bit into Lagos and Abuja, that’s probably visiting friends and relatives from Nigeria who live in Ireland.”

Booking trends within Ireland are changing too.

“We are getting ourselves together slowly to measure bookings and where they come from exactly,” said Mr Corneille. “Dublin and the wider Leinster area still accounts for the business, but we are seeing among the travel agents a 20-point jump in the last six months from Munster. We’re not able to break it down but the strategy of having somebody here on the ground to represent us is working.”