BENGALURU: Chief Commercial Manager, Emirates, Adnan Kasim, on Friday said the response from India’s Silicon Valley is tremendous. “We commenced operations in Bengaluru in 2006 and we have already seen over six million passengers flying from here to Dubai via EK (Emirates) and it is a success story for us.
“The product of Emirates is well appreciated by Karnataka. They may go to Dubai or even beyond Dubai to Germany and the UK and a lot of ethnic traffic is happening.The airport is well equipped to receive A380,” he said.
He said, “The demand for air travel is spiking. Already, 70-80 per cent of international and 100 per cent domestic travel has recovered. In the last eight months, Dubai has crossed 9 million tourists from all over the world, and India is leading the way.”
On its operations still continuing to Russia despite the Ukraine war, he said, “We have a bilateral (agreement) with Russia and we need to respect that. Our objective is humanitarian. There are students and they need to be connected to their families. If Russia requires us for medical reasons we reach them. It is mainly around that sort of boundary that we continue our operations.”
He said, “Today, we launched a new configuration in the form of a Fourth Class, the Premium Economy. It has 56 seats. We have six aircraft with premium economy. It is completely refurbished including the colour.”