Emirates Airline in waiting game for Germany expansion

Thierry Antinori, the chief commercial officer of Emirates, says the carrier is optimistic it can open new routes in Germany. Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters

Emirates Airline said it is ready to play the long game in seeking to add routes in Germany, one of the few major travel markets that the world’s No 1 airline by international traffic is struggling to penetrate.

Emirates, which has overcome the modest population of its home base by building Dubai into a long-haul transfer hub, can serve only four German cities under a bilateral air-services accord dating from 1975 that is “maybe a little old”, the chief commercial officer, Thierry Antinori, said yesterday in Frankfurt.

“We will get the traffic rights one day or the other,” Mr Antinori said. “It’s a question of time. We have to respect the rules. Germany is missing an opportunity, it is a pity.”

Emirates’ timetable to Europe’s biggest economy comprises three daily trips to Frankfurt and two apiece to Munich, Hamburg and Düsseldorf, with none to Berlin, the capital.

That compares with its network of six UK airports and five in Australia, a country with just over one quarter of Germany’s population.

Since Emirates began flights to Hamburg in 2006, the carrier has added 59 further destinations spanning major markets such as the United States and China, as well Italy and smaller economies including Austria and Switzerland, Mr Antinori said.

“The only country we did not open a new destination in was Germany,” he said. “We are not obsessed, we are not angry. We are also very optimistic, because Germany is the most pragmatic country in Europe.”

In order to boost capacity on those German routes it can serve, Emirates yesterday converted one daily Frankfurt flight to operation with an Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger plane. The double-decker features 519 seats, adding 165 a day compared with the Boeing 777 used previously.

The switch means Emirates now serves 30 destinations with the A380, and makes Germany the carrier’s most important market for the model after the United Kingdom, with Munich’s two daily flights already superjumbo-operated.

Emirates has 51 A380s in the fleet, with firm orders for a further 89. It will also start serving Dallas with the plane from October, and San Francisco and Houston starting in December.

The airline is ready to order more A380s should Airbus offer a version with more fuel-efficient engines, Mr Antinori said.

He added Emirates has little interest in the Airbus A330neo, a re-engined version of the wide-body, which the manufacturer announced recently would be developed to extend the life of the ageing twin-turbine model.

Emirates’ outstanding fleet requirement is for a plane offering 250 to 350 seats, with the upper end of that range beyond the planned capacity of the revamped jetliner.

Earlier, Mr Antinori said the carrier was not interested in investing in the international operations of Qantas, in an interview with Reuters.

In the biggest restructuring step since Qantas was privatised two decades ago, the airline is hiving off its international arm from its domestic business.

The move will allow a foreign airline to take as much as a 49 per cent stake ­- a major change from the previous 35 per cent limit - and analysts had suggested that alliance partner Emirates could be interested.

But Mr Antinori said that does not fit with the airline’s strategy.

“We buy planes and invest in products; we do not buy shares,” he told Reuters during an event in Frankfurt to celebrate the airline putting the A380 jumbo jet on the Dubai-Frankfurt route.

Under its partnership with Qantas, through which the companies share some revenue, Qantas has moved its European operations base from Singapore to Dubai and Emirates is letting Qantas share its new terminal, which was for the exclusive use of its A380.

* Bloomberg News and Reuters