While there’s no doubt many are ready for life to go back to normal as soon as possible, it’s going to be more of a gradual process as we have seen in the example of Dubai beginning to reopen businesses, malls and restaurants.
This gradual recovery model is what Emirates Airline is expecting after the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Dubai-based airline’s president, Tim Clark, predicting it could be up to four years for the airline to resume its full flight network.
“I think probably by the year 2022/23, 2023/24 we will see things coming back to some degree of normality and Emirates will be operating its network as it was and hopefully as successfully as it was,” he explained in an online interview with John Strickland, an aviation consultant, reports.
This “degree of normality” for the airline is flying to 157 destinations across 83 countries, which is the capacity Emirates was operating at prior to the grounding of flights due to the pandemic.
While the airline is starting to slowly relaunch flights to different destinations – with the aim of upping this to 50 destinations this month – this current period is the most difficult in the 35 years Emirates has been running. It’s strenuous times indeed, as there were redundancies announced by the airline earlier this week.
Despite Clark’s beliefs it could be years before Emirates sees a full recovery, he is hopeful we could see a significant jump in travel demand by summer next year. However, this is all dependent on a successful vaccine being produced.
“We will start to see an uptick, quite a large uptick in demand for travel,” he said.
