Dubai’s Emirates not looking at any layoffs as it looks to gradually ramp up operations

Dubai airline Emirates is in a “good shape” in terms of its current workforce with no further layoffs planned at present, a senior official has confirmed.

With the rollout of Covid-19 vaccination campaigns worldwide, the airline is now looking to ramp up capacity and its network, Adnan Kazim, Emirates’ chief commercial officer (CCO) told Gulf Business at the Arabian Travel Market (ATM) in Dubai.

“For the time-being, there is no discussion around layoffs,” he said.

“Today we are in a good shape from a manpower side. We don’t need to re-hire – we can handle [operations] with our current manpower. But as we gradually see more ramp-up happening in the capacity in the future, for sure there are certain segments of business that maybe need more backup and more support. Definitely I think that for these businesses, we will look at them and try to ramp up manpower. But today, as we stand, we are in a good shape to meet the requirements for the future.”

Emirates, which is currently operating to almost 120 destinations, is looking to increase capacity and and its network as more countries reopen their borders.

“In terms of the network, we have managed to recover almost 120 destinations and the focus for us will be to bring the network back gradually to the level that we used to do – 143 destinations in the past – and to also bring the capacity back,” said Kazim.

The airline is currently at roughly 30-35 per cent of capacity mainly since it is not operating flights to the Indian subcontinent, South Africa and Nigeria, among others.

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“Today we are quite limited in capacity deployment, but the capacity ramp-up will happen in phases as we see more opening of borders across the world,” he said.

“It’s a challenging time at present – we’re going through many lockdowns in many core markets in the subcontinent that we stopped operating to. But these are all short term measures taken by our government and we support all these measures.

“However, as we progress towards summer, we do see that things will shape up gradually with the vaccination drive increasing in many places in the world. We’re seeing a lot of traction happening between the US and UK. Many European destinations are also opening up already and want tourists to come in – like Greece. There is indication that many other European gateways will open up in the future,” he explained.

“With all these things happening, we’re quite optimistic that by summer we should gradually open up. That should ramp up our capacity hopefully to between 40 per cent to 50 per cent by summer and then gradually to 70 per cent by winter. All of this is subject to easing up of the protocols by many countries. Today we can plan what we can plan, but a lot of it depends on countries in terms of how things shape up and how they open up,” Kazim added.