Emirates confident in Zagreb route potential
Emirates has said it sees its Dubai – Zagreb service developing in the future and is monitoring the performance of other airports in the country, particularly Dubrovnik. The airline’s Senior Vice President for Commercial Operations in Europe, Thierry Aucoc, said, “We decided to launch Zagreb a bit more than two years ago and it is corresponding with our development in Europe. We have a wide coverage in Europe, and we understood that Croatia has big potential for two reasons. First, it is a destination that is really interesting for travel from Asia, Australia, China and Taiwan. Therefore, there is a lot of incoming traffic to Zagreb and the entire country in general. From Croatia it is a way to offer the local population a link to our Dubai hub. There is a lot of demand from Croatia to the world. This is primarily to Dubai but also beyond, for example, to destinations in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, such as Phuket in Thailand”.
Mr Aucoc said that Croatia still has “good potential” for future route development and “fits extremely well within our network”. He added, “I was checking the results of airports in Croatia and I was amazed to see that many have double digit growth. I noticed that Zagreb is now at 3.5 million passengers per year, which is a very good result. We are monitoring other airports in the country too. We are closely following the performance in Dubrovnik because we are offering seasonal flights to this city through Flydubai”. The Senior Vice President noted that 258 Croatian nationals work at Emirates. Of those, 210 are cabin crew, while sixteen are pilots, three of which command the Airbus A380 superjumbos.
Emirates recently completed its seasonal operations to Zagreb for 2019 with the route taken over by Flydubai during the winter months. Zagreb was the first example of Emirates’ and Flydubai’s new route-sharing strategy, with Yangon joining its ranks this year. “Zagreb is an example of how much our cooperation with Flydubai managed to improve our results. We served the route in winter with our Boeing 777 aircraft. Then last year, the route was maintained for five months by Flydubai aircraft. This winter, Flydubai will operate for the entire winter season because it emerged that this route is not as strong in winter, so we can still continue serving Zagreb well”, Emirates’ Area Manager, Martin Gross, said recently. This winter season, Flydubai will maintain four weekly flights to the Croatian capital (with exception to the first two weeks of the winter schedule), down from daily last year. “Zagreb was operated with Boeing 737 MAX equipment but had to be moved to the B737-800. Therefore, the entire flight plan had to change and has been partially reduced. Now we have to see when the B737 MAX is allowed to fly again”, Mr Gross added.
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