Luxury Travel Advisor - June 2008 - (Page 52)

COVER STORY Nigel Page Keeping Emirates Airline High on North America’s Radar Screen N igel Page recalls a Dubai that was small and quaint upon his first visit in 1974. In fact, if you ask him what it was like, he’ll grin and recall that there was “a lot of sand and not too much tarmac.” “It was a delightful place in those days— there was one tiny supermarket in the square, there was only one post office, a fruit and vegetable market and a fish market,” he says. “You would drive up in your car and get out and a man with a wheelbarrow would follow you around and put all the goods in it that you’d bought and then he would take it back to your car. “Jumeirah Beach Road—which today, of course, stretches on for miles, all the way down to the Jumeirah Beach Hotel—well, that had about 10 houses along the side of the road and then it became a sandtrap. And that was Dubai in those days,” Page says. Fast forward 34 years to 2008 and Page, Emirates Airline’s senior vice president of commercial operations for the Americas, has quite a different take on the place. “Today I go back every month or two months and it changes every time I return,” he says. “There is so much building going on. Three years ago, they talked about 23 percent of the world’s tallest buildings being in Dubai. Now they say about a third of the world’s cranes are in Dubai.” But while Page sees Dubai as a tourism product that has evolved from a tiny international trading hub into one of the fastest-growing metropolises of all time, he sees Dubai-based Emirates Airline—which launched in 1985 with two leased aircraft and is wholly owned by the Government of Dubai—as a product that was a factor to be contended with from the get-go. “I’ve now been with Emirates for 15 years and one of the things that attracted me to the company when I went there in 1993 was that from day one, they set out to have an airline of very high quality in everything they did,” says Page. “Emirates was always determined to be a technological leader; that resulted in its being the first airline to have seat-back entertainment in every class of the airplane before anyone else. I was incredibly impressed every time I flew on them,” says Page, who first experienced an EMIRATES AIRLINE Headquarters: Dubai, UAE Owner: Government of Dubai Chairman & CEO: His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum President: Tim Clark Senior vice president of commercial operations for the Americas: Nigel Page (based in New York) Service: Emirates currently serves 100 cities. Operations from New York and Houston to Dubai connect the U.S. with Asia, Australia and Africa. The airline on September 1 will launch a nonstop flight to Dubai from Los Angeles. It will launch nonstop service from San Francisco on October 26. Website: www.emirates.com/usa BY RUTHANNE TERRERO Emirates flight when he was based in Dubai, working as the general manager for the Middle East for British Airways. (Page has a distinguished career in the airline industry, having also worked at BA’s forerunner, BOAC, starting in 1968 as a reservations agent before holding several international positions for the airline.) “I was really knocked out by [Emirates],” he says, noting that when the airline launched service that was competitive to BA’s into London, “they absolutely annihilated us,” he says with a laugh. “I realized then that this was a very serious airline.” And serious it is now, having just reported revenues of US$10.8 billion, an increase of 32.3 percent from $8.1 billion the prior year. And in its just-ended financial year, it carried 21.2 million passengers, marking a 3.7 million increase over the previous year. The airline now flies to six continents; last year it added Houston, Newcastle, Venice, São Paulo, Ahmedabad (the largest city in the state of Gujarat, India), Toronto and Cape Town to its offerings; it also increased service on its existing routes to China, India, the Middle East and Africa. Emirates also enhanced its young fleet of aircraft with 11 new Boeing 777s last year (which includes the futuristic 777-200LR Worldliner passenger aircraft, which will be the longestrange commercial airplane in the world). All told, Emirates now has 114 aircraft, which average just 67 months in age; that’s one of the youngest fleets in the business, and more new planes are on order. Page is quick to point out that while Emir- 52 LUXURY TRAVEL ADVISOR | June 2008 http://www.emirates.com/usa

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Luxury Travel Advisor - June 2008 Contents Publisher's Letter Editor's Letter Paris Shanghai New York Takeover Hotels Townhouse Galleria Florida Spas BVI Bliss Athens, Greece Rainforest Excursions Nigel Page The Pulse Jetset Report Just Back On Location Sightings Agent Access Source List

Luxury Travel Advisor - June 2008

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