TravTalk Middle East Online Magazine
Being in the forefront of aviation, Emirates airline continues to provide customers a seamless onboard experience. Their commitment to accessibility, sustainability and unique flight experience make them the leader in the region. Adil Al Ghaith, Senior Vice President, Commercial Operations, Gulf, Middle East and Central Asia, shares plans for the New Year with TRAVTALK.
Shehara Rizly
What will be the focus of Emirates this year in terms of new products onboard?
Our overall focus for 2023 will continue to be our Premium Economy experience as we begin rolling it out to more cities. Premium Economy has proved hugely popular with cabins fully booked up. Since we began selling Premium Economy in August 2022, we have seen many of our Economy Class customers trading up to fly this cabin, and the feedback so far has been fantastic.
We will also continue to build on the commitment we made in 2022 to invest US $2 billion in the inflight customer experience across all cabins, including dining and service enhancements, onboard amenities underpinned by sustainability, rolling out more cabin upgrades and integrating new digital initiatives both in the air and on the ground to ensure we continue to provide an unrivalled customer proposition.
How do you cater to travellers with accessibility issues?
Emirates works hard to make air travel as comfortable and as seamless as possible for all our customers, including those with special needs and disabilities. We regularly listen to and review feedback from our customers, employees and advocacy groups, and we are on our own journey in taking a joined-up approach with our partners within the aviation and travel ecosystem to develop improved services and solutions and provide the consistency that travellers with disabilities expect.
All of our current projects in place as well as future initiatives around accessibility ladder back to Dubai’s aim in becoming one of the world’s most accessible cities for People of Determination. For more information, visit: https://www.emirates.com/ae/english/before-you-fly/health/accessible-travel/
Would you be able to share the new platforms or services to be introduced to generate seamless travel for customers and how partner travel agencies could assist in ensuing that this would go further?
Throughout the last few years, we’ve been further strengthening our customer focus by developing products and services based on key insights and travel trends. We’ve meticulously mapped out the pain points across the customer journey and doubled down to ensure a frictionless experience, introducing initiatives like our ‘biometric path’ for an entirely contactless airport experience, technology driven services like self-check in and bag drop kiosks, mobile check-in ports, remote check in facilities in Ajman with more to be added in 2023, amongst other initiatives. In 2023, we’ll continue advancing these initiatives and exploring new cutting-edge technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence and automation. We recently signed an MoU with the Dubai Future Foundation to facilitate pilot projects like a robot check-in agent that leverages facial recognition to interact with customers, as well as a robot waiter to serve passengers in our airport lounges. All of these pilot projects aim to deliver seamless experiences to our customers, in line with our world-class proposition as an airline and as a destination, to ensure our trade agency partners have more unique selling points for Emirates when engaging with travellers.
