How UAE-UK air travel bookings have soared following amber list upgrade

The impact of lifting quarantine rules for UAE travellers visiting Britain from August 8 has been “dramatic”, said Juan Gómez, insights expert at aviation analytics company ForwardKeys.

“During the first half of the year, flight bookings between the UK and the UAE reached just seven percent of pre-pandemic levels in 2019, according to ForwardKeys data. “In some weeks, we even saw more cancellations than new bookings,” said Gómez.

However, once it was announced in late July that the UAE would be added to the amber list, data for the following week – from August 5-11 – reveals that flight bookings soared to 30 percent over pre-pandemic levels for tickets from the UAE to the UK, and to eight percent over 2019 levels in the opposite direction.

According to John Grant (pictured below), partner at aviation analysis firm Midas Aviation, the UK-UAE air route could see traffic reach around 60 per cent of pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year.

Emirates and Etihad revealed plans to ramp up their respective capacities earlier this month, while British Airways (BA) on Wednesday resumed its once-daily flights from London to Dubai for the first time since January.

Emirates announced it would be operating 73 weekly flights into the UK by October, including a six-times-a-day Heathrow operation, double-daily A380 flights to Manchester, 10 weekly services to Birmingham and daily services to Glasgow.

The Dubai-owned carrier has now resumed passenger services to more than 120 destinations, recovering close to 90 per cent of its pre-pandemic network.

Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways has rescheduled three daily flights to London’s Heathrow and once daily to Manchester.

“In the here and now, UAE airlines have to play the hand they are dealt,” a spokesperson for UK-based aviation consulting firm StratAero Research told Arabian Business. “It’s clear the local carriers want to monetise what demand is out there because there’s absolutely no certainty that things will last given the constantly-changing pandemic backdrop.”

Grant urged UAE airlines to remain cautious amid a constantly shifting global health landscape.

“The UK government has already shown that it is capable of putting back restrictions at a moment’s notice,” the Midas Aviation expert said. “What’s more, with the Northern Hemisphere winter looming – the travel industry can’t be complacent.”

Some Asian markets remain effectively closed for travel to and from the UK until at least 2022 and these constraints could represent a sizeable bump in the road for aviation recovery, according to Grant.

“For carriers such as Emirates and Etihad, a large proportion of their traffic is connecting onwards to other markets in South East Asia and Australasia… with that traffic not flowing, the airline industry will not be able to get back to its pre-Covid19 levels,” Grant said.

According to StratAero Research, if the current UK-UAE “status quo” continues, flight demand between the two countries will continue to be robust for the remainder of the year.