DUBAI—In a world buzzing with budget carriers, Emirates Airline is flying in the opposite direction.
It has revved up the glitz by pouring billions of dollars into its fleet of planes, in-flight entertainment,
wine lists and seats in order to hold on to a relatively small but fiercely loyal group of the world’s biggest-spending travelers.
In November, Emirates rolled out private suites on its newest
Boeing 777 jets—three of the 40-square-foot single-seat cabins fit across the width of the airliner. It has upgraded its fleet of chauffeured cars that whisk upmarket fliers to and from the airport, replacing Volvos with BMWs equipped with Wi-Fi hot spots. It spent $6.7 million building a lavish lounge at Boston’s Logan airport, part of a global makeover that included upgrades for lounges in Singapore and Bangkok.
Last year, Emirates spent $56 million on its collection of fine French wines alone. It has splashed out $780 million on the stuff since 2006 and owns its own wine cellars in France. On a recent flight, cabin crew poured a $566 bottle of 1998 Chateau Margaux for its first-class passengers. On some routes, the airline regularly offers the exclusive Hennessy Paradis Imperial cognac, which retails for more than $1,000 a bottle. Emirates surprised its first- and business-class passengers on a Dubai-Paris flight in April with an onboard wine-tasting master class led by a top vintner.
“I want it to feel like you are walking into a Ritz-Carlton,” says longtime President Tim Clark, who helped start the Dubai-owned carrier more than 30 years ago.
The airline is betting that the high profit margins of its luxury tickets will allow it to avoid chasing masses of travelers riding in discounted coach seats. The idea threatens to overturn one of the tenets of how to thrive as a large network carrier.
For most of the rest of the industry, the strategy has, until recently, seemed too expensive and too risky. Carriers have always
pushed higher-margin first-class and business seats. Analysts say those seats can make up about half of a big airline’s revenue and most of its profit.
But they have also relied on
filling the rest of their planes with lower-paying economy passengers to squeeze revenue out of every flight. Big carriers add capacity when times are good, trying to fill planes and capture market share. But the excess supply naturally depresses prices, eroding profit margins.
Emirates’ focus on its top-paying customers—who aren’t as inclined to make purchases based on price—insulates it somewhat from the industry’s boom-and-bust cycle. It has a higher proportion of business and first-class seats than its peers, and it puts less emphasis on filling every seat in the plane.
Emirates’ load factor, a measure of seats sold per plane, is roughly 78%, compared with the industry average of more than 80%.
The
amenities keep P.N.C. Menon, the founder and chairman of Dubai-based property developer Sobha Group, coming back. “I don’t fly with anybody else unless Emirates doesn’t operate there,” he says. He always books first class. Emirates consistently scores among top carriers in rankings by Skytrax, a London-based consultancy that factors in customer feedback.
Ticket prices are highly variable, but Emirates’ can be notably higher. On Emirates, a round trip between Dubai and London for mid-July travel was recently priced at around $10,400 in first class and $4,600 in business. A round-trip “upper class” ticket on Virgin Atlantic, with a seat that converts to a flat bed, between the cities was selling for around $3,400.
Between 2010 and 2015, Emirates’ profit margin averaged 5.5%, more than double the 2.3% average margin for the industry as a whole, according to data from the International Air Transport Association.
But Emirates has an extra sensitivity to oil prices. Lower fuel costs usually help carriers, but since so many of Emirates’ customers are in the business, a drop can hurt ticket sales.
In 2016, when oil prices were at lows, the margin slipped to 1.5%, recovering to 3% by 2017. Airlines globally averaged a 4.7% margin over the 2016-17 period.
The airline, part of Emirates Group, reported revenue of $25.2 billion for the latest fiscal year ended March 31, and profit of $762 million. It is 100%-owned by the government of Dubai, one of seven semiautonomous states that make up the United Arab Emirates. Its shares don’t trade on any exchange, so disclosure has always been limited, and analysts don’t follow it closely.
That has raised skepticism from competitors. American and European airlines accuse Emirates and other Mideast carriers of benefiting from unfair, hidden subsidies from their oil-rich government owners. Emirates and the others deny that.
Despite suspicions that Emirates’ strategy alone isn’t creating all its profits, some
airlines are now taking a page from its playbook.
Deutsche Lufthansa AG , one of Emirates’ chief rivals in Europe, is rolling out an upgraded business class when it takes delivery of a fleet of new Boeing jets in two years. The seats will convert into 7-foot beds, which can be controlled by a passenger’s smartphone. The airline offers a cigar bar in its Frankfurt first-class lounge. It arranges rental Porsche 911s for passengers looking to kill time between flights.
“We want to offer as much premium as possible,” says Stefan Kreuzpaintner, head of Lufthansa sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. U.S. carriers, including
Delta Air Lines Inc. and
United Continental Holdings Inc., are also spiffing up their premium classes. Delta last year introduced a new business class seat, with shoulder-high privacy doors and “memory” foam cushions that retain the contours of a passenger’s body.
“Early on, some of what Emirates offered was seen as gimmicky,” says airline consultant John Strickland. “People no longer scoff,” he says.
In some ways the superluxe strategy has been around since the start of long-haul commercial aviation—for years, a mode of transportation only the rich could afford. In the 1940s, Pan Am’s fleet of long-range Flying Clippers offered filet mignon on white tablecloths. A few decades later, the Concorde came to embody the new, global jet set. A handful of Asian carriers, like
Cathay Pacific and
Singapore Airlines , marketed themselves as more exclusive, pricier, options for long-haul travel.
Emirates, which started in 1985 as a shuttle service between Dubai and Pakistan, turbocharged that model, taking advantage of the geography of its hub in Dubai, situated between Asia and the West. It spawned copy cats of its own—Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways.
Dubai is opening in phases a sprawling new airport that will require a fast resumption of growth at the airline to justify the cost, already $30 billion in the initial stages. Dubai’s current airport—
itself a luxurious destination full of high-end lounges and services—hosts 90 million passenger a year. The new airport’s capacity is expected to eventually reach 200 million.
Low oil prices in recent years frightened off some of Emirates’ most lucrative travelers—international oil and gas executives and big spenders in the Middle East. A short-lived
ban on travel to America from several Mideast countries and temporary gadget restrictions hit traffic. U.S.-bound passengers fell by 35%.
In the darkest days of the oil-price rout, when profits and margins sank, Mr. Clark cut costs—but only behind the scenes, and in the back of the plane, where economy passengers sit, not in the premium cabin. Mr. Clark brought some parts production, such as seat-number plates, in house. Emirates started serving its own, cheaper bread rolls. In economy, it stopped handing out hot towels and served less-expensive cuts of meat.
Emirates also experimented with tactics some other airlines had adopted from budget carriers. It started selling discounted fares in its economy cabin, charging extra for a seat assignment or checked luggage. Last year, it began to
team up with budget airline Flydubai, also owned by the Dubai government, to cooperate on some routes.
But Emirates refused to skimp on business and first-class customers. “The amount of money you would save by going from Champagne to orange juice in business class is infinitesimally small,” Mr. Clark says. “The effect on the brand is devastating.”
Now, the oil price is back up to around $75 a barrel—from a low of around $25 two years ago—and lucrative flights are being reinstated. For its flight to Houston, a key route for high-paying energy executives, Emirates has resumed using giant Airbus A380s. Emirates has been, by far, the biggest buyer of the superjumbo jet—the world’s biggest commercial aircraft—in part because of all the room it provides for business and first-class space.
The Dubai-Houston flights are now configured with 14 first-class seats, 76 business class seats and about 400 coach seats. That’s up from eight first-class and 42 business class seats and around 400 coach seats on the Boeing 777 used in recent years.
Two years ago, Mr. Clark hired Christoph Mueller, who previously helped turn around two troubled airlines, Ireland’s Aer Lingus and Malaysia Airlines, to push Emirates’ luxury offerings beyond just comfortable seats and expensive wine lists. Mr. Mueller has a goal to
turn Emirates into a high-end lifestyle companyfor the world’s wealthiest passengers.
He aims to make Emirates’ high-end passengers’ journeys as seamless as possible—from pickup at home to drop-off at the hotel. Passengers drinking a certain white wine in an Emirates lounge should be welcomed with a glass of the same once on board, Mr. Mueller says. A passenger watching a movie on their tablet on the way to the airport should be able to arrive aboard and find it spooled up and ready to continue on the plane.
Emirates plans to reconfigure its onboard kitchens to offer by year-end meal service to business-class passengers on demand, rather than at set times. Mr. Mueller wants to personalize menus, so you don’t have to eat the same thing everyone else is having.
Outside of its planes, the airline is also pushing into concierge services, such as booking hard-to-get restaurant reservations and offering all-in-one holiday packages at Dubai’s glitzy resorts.
Corrections & Amplifications
Emirates’ load factor is roughly 78%. An earlier version of this article and an accompanying graphic incorrectly stated it was 67%. (July 12, 2018)
By Robert Wall and
Nicolas Parasie
Appeared in the July 13, 2018, print edition as 'Chateau Margaux for Seat 2A: Emirates Rewrites Airline Rules.'
