When Laurie Berryman joined Emirates in 1990, he was looking forward to a quiet life.
At the time the airline was a small-time player with only a handful of aircraft and few routes. Berryman had arrived from British Airways, where he worked in the Middle East, and wanted to move back to the UK for family reasons.
“I came to Emirates because I wanted to join a small airline,” he tells me over coffee at the airline’s central London offices.
When it launched in 1985 the airline had only two leased jets. Now it has 233. It began its operations flying between Dubai and the Indian subcontinent on three routes, and now covers huge swathes of the globe, leveraging its position between the old powers of Europe and the growing might of Asia and Africa.
Seemingly out of nowhere, it has ballooned to become one of the world’s largest airlines - and in an era of mounting losses, a highly profitable one.
Growing gateways
The UK has always been a key destination. Starting out at Gatwick (as “Heathrow was full”) Emirates has now spread to take in five other UK airports.
Berryman’s first job at the airline was that of area manager and he oversaw the first flights to Manchester.
“It took a while to build up and only went daily in 1997. It had gone double daily by 2003, and then we shocked the world by putting an A380 in Manchester in 2010,” he says.
“Everyone would say: ‘there’s no first and business traffic in Manchester’. There is first and business traffic up there”
"We have more than 1,200 seats a day up in Manchester, and it runs a very, very good load factor.”
Other cities too have benefited from Emirates’ desire to funnel traffic into its Dubai hub. Birmingham was added in 2000 followed by Glasgow in 2004 and Newcastle in 2007.
“Today we sit with 16 flights a day out of our six gateways, which offer more than 70,000 seats a day to Dubai and beyond,” Berryman says.
It wasn’t always like this. In the early days the public struggled with the name. In order to boost brand awareness executives settled on the idea of sport sponsorship: when Arsenal’s new ground was opened in 2006 it was christened the Emirates Stadium.
The company now sponsors Durham and Lancashire county cricket clubs and was a high-profile backer of this year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
“I’ve been in the company a long time and I can remember getting out there in the early days trying to persuade people to fly Emirates and they didn’t know what we were: were we an oil company?
“So we had to get that brand out. By the turn of the millennium we were just beginning to get known, but quite locally.”
Berryman adds: “Dubai was becoming iconic in its own way as a destination but we built the brand, first with football sponsorship then other sponsorships.”
Understanding aviation
Undoubtedly Emirates has been aided by the growth in popularity of Dubai as a tourist destination.
Last year it welcomed more than 11 million hotel guests and it is aiming to up visitor numbers to 20 million a year, rising to 25 million in 2020 when it hosts the World Expo.
Of course it helps that the airline is owned by the Dubai government. Some opponents in the industry have used this as a stick with which to beat it, but Berryman waves away such criticism, labelling it a “huge misconception”.
“We fund our aircraft with normal banking just like British Airways does, just like every other airline does”
“We were given $10 million to start up back in 1985 and we’ve not had a penny from the government ever since,” he says.
“We’ve made profits every year bar our second year of operation. We fund our aircraft with normal banking just like British Airways does, just like every other airline does.”
He adds: “What we will admit to is that we’ve got a government that understands aviation and the importance of aviation to the role of the UAE, the role of Dubai itself.”
Few people would say the same is true of the UK. Next year Sir Howard Davies is due to give his long-awaited decision on what should be done about airport capacity. The shortlisted options cover both Gatwick and Heathrow and as someone who has been long-associated with both, Berryman is sitting firmly on the fence.
“We want to see more capacity. We’re not backing one horse or the other. We’d like to see politicians, when they go into that election, say they will implement whatever Davies recommends. And none of them are saying that yet.”
Whatever Davies decides may not matter. By 2022, Dubai’s own mega-hub - Al Maktoum International airport at Dubai World Central - will be ready with the ability to handle a mind-boggling 120 million passengers a year.
“The luck of geography has put Dubai in a super place as a connecting city. Whether it’s travelling from Europe down to the Far East and Australia, or whether its coming out of the Chinese, Japanese or Korean regions across Dubai into Africa,” says Berryman.
Game-changing A380
Emirates though has not been the only airline to take advantage of both the position and supreme wealth of the Middle East. Competitors such as Etihad and Qatar Airways have sprung up to try and take their own chunk out of a lucrative market.
“We welcome competition,” says Berryman. “We were the first and we like to still think that we are the best. And the difference between us is that we’ve got Dubai.”
The airline also notably has the largest fleet of next-generation superjumbos. Of the 147 Airbus A380s currently flying around the world, Emirates owns 56.
“Possibly the game changer in the past five years has been the A380. It has been hugely successful.
“We have five of them a day out of Heathrow, one out of Gatwick and one out of Manchester. So seven out of our 16 flights are now on A380s.
Five years on, they still have a magnetic draw. People love flying on them and we see strong load factors.”
Despite the positive glow surrounding the company however, there remain plenty of challenges. Civil war and the outbreak of Ebola forced the airline to close a number of routes recently and in 2015 there will be the UK’s general election to watch out for.
“If you take your eye off the ball for even one week you can miss something,” Berryman adds.
