Emirates Airline’s Success Proves That Medium – And Long-Haul Can Be Successful Out Of London Stansted
Already established in the London market with flights to Heathrow and Gatwick airports, Emirates Airline inaugurated flights between its Dubai International hub and Stansted. Now, just a year on and the carrier is adding a second daily frequency, meeting strong local demand, but also delivering additional connection options. London Stansted Airport CCO Aboudy Nasser explains why the route has proved successful and sees the London airport become the second fastest global destination airport to secure a second daily Emirates frequency from Dubai.
Transcript
Aboudy Nasser:You know, in the past we have had long-haul operators operate in London Stansted. The first ones were sort of EOS and Maxjet back in sort of 2008 and '09. It's a very different environment. When those guys were operating, it was on the cusp of the global financial crisis. 2009 came along, you know, the airlines got hit across the world, so unfortunately they didn't survive. Our parent company MAG, Manchester Airport Group, took over London Stansted back in 2013. We completely changed the mentality, the way of working. When we took over in 2013, there was 18 million passengers going through London Stansted. Now there's 29 million passengers, and we're planning for 43 million passengers over the coming few years. The region that we operate in is booming. There are different clusters. There's biotech clusters in Cambridge and east of England. We've got Tech City, the likes of Google, Amazon, all have offices now within 35-40 minutes of the airport. We have new government agencies around Harlow, so that whole region where we operate is absolutely booming and on fire. And that's why Emirates came in a year ago, and within a year, the second fastest ever going from a daily to a double daily for Emirates was with us at London Stansted, because they did so well in that first year, they're now growing to that second daily. The other reason that they're doing so well is that actually, when you look at CAA data and you plot catchment areas for the 3 main London airports, You'll find Gatwick's catchment area is very much to the south of the UK and extending west towards sort of Dorset, that sort of West Country. Heathrow tends to be more sort of west end of London going out to the west. When you put the two together, they overlap. So there's a tremendous overlap between Heathrow catchment area And a Gatwick catchment area. So the airlines operating to those 2 airports are essentially competing with each other. Our area is not just booming, but it has a very unique catchment area. People do not want to travel 2 and a half hours around the M25 to go to London Gatwick or to London Heathrow. They want to have services operating. So you've got this sort of perfect condition really of a fast-growing economic area, with a unique catchment area, and that's why we see Emirates come in. And actually, one of the interesting things, actually, we subscribe to some screen scraping tools for airline websites, screen scraping tools, and when you look forward, you'll see that consistently the available fare to Dubai from Emirates on London Stansted exceeds that of Heathrow and Gatwick. Why? Because it's a unique catchment area and there's no overlap between the Heathrow and Gatwick in competition to drive fares down. So we see ourselves in a superb position for the future.
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