‘We Want More Business out of Western Canada’
~ Words by Vickie Sam Paget, Sky Blue Content ~
Everything that Emirates Airline touches seems to turn to gold… The airline has been successfully tapping into the lucrative Western Canadian market to feed its Seattle-Dubai service for more than a year now, and with the recent relaxation of the visa requirements for Canadian citizens visiting the UAE, the airline seems set for an even larger market share from north of the border. WSA meets up with the carrier’s country manager for Canada, Don McWilliam, to talk about his vision for the future…
How is business from Western Canada?
We’ve been really thrilled with the support we’ve gotten out of Western Canada – Alberta, as well as Vancouver. I’m delighted to say that we’re making our targets for Western Canada for the Seattle flight. It hasn’t been without its challenges, but it’s been very positive because of the agency community. It’s more than a year since the service launched.
How do you feel about going forward?
You know, we’re never happy. We want more business out of Western Canada – and we’re seeing that – we’re seeing it develop really nicely. There are just so many things going on in Dubai, like our new concourse. It’s about the length of three football fields. It’s just a tremendous terminal and by 2015, Dubai will be the busiest airport in the world. We’re also looking down the road to develop some new package programs with tour operators out of Canada. We have a couple of tour operators that we’re talking to about developing packages to India and so on. India is one of the key destinations and so is South Africa. Up to this point we haven’t been that aggressive with tour operators in Canada, only because our load factors out of Toronto are so strong that we’ve never really needed that channel of distribution. But we’re positioning ourselves for the future.
Are you going to continue to expand at this rapid rate?
Yes. We just took delivery of our 30th A380 and we still have over $71 billion on order. Now some of those airplanes over time will be replacing ones that have already been in the fleet, but we still have another 200 planes on order. The Americas for Emirates is a tremendous opportunity and we’re going at it very aggressively.
Are any of those planes going to service Seattle?
There are no plans to expand out of Seattle. We would very much like to fly more out of Canada. The desire is clearly still there for additional frequency into Toronto and a new service into Calgary, and possibly Vancouver as well. It makes perfect sense, and when you see the connections out of Calgary or Seattle or Toronto to the Middle East and Africa and India – the market is there. We’ll leave that for the government officials to deal with it, and we’re optimistic that in time we can put something together.
Image: Emirates
This interview first appeared in WSA by CT, a monthly publication for Canadian travel agents.
