Emirates airline has won the coveted World’s Best Airline In-flight Entertainment 2005 in the latest World Airline Awards announced recently by Skytrax Research of London.
The award was based on the annual Airline Inflight Entertainment (IFE) survey conducted by Skytrax between June 2004 and May 2005 that included more than one million survey responses from over 85 different nationalities. Emirates was also declared first in the Best Airlines Middle East and Best Regional Airline Middle East and Africa categories.
It was second in Best Economy Class intercontinental and received the Airline of the Year Bronze Award.
The IFE survey measured each airline’s in-flight entertainment on different aspects of passenger satisfaction – overall quality, selection of movies including choice of languages, video and audio programmes, games and other interactive options and the quality of headsets.
Commenting on the results, Peter Miller director of marketing at Skytrax, said, “The whole relative concept of in-flight entertainment has changed dramatically in the last ten years and the importance of IFE to passengers continues to grow. Choice is paramount and in the past couple of years it has become more focussed on giving the customer control.”
Patrick Branelly, vice-president passenger communications and visual services at Emirates, commented, “Ever since Emirates in 1992 was the first airline in the world to offer a personal TV in all three classes, it has been committed to offering the very best movies, TV and audio programmes and games. Today, Emirates’ typical investment in in-flight entertainment systems equates to nearly $10 million per aircraft”.
Emirates continues to enhance the in-flight entertainment offering, as it does in every aspect of its operations. In December 2003, Emirates was the first airline in the world to broadcast live BBC news headlines to its fleet of aircraft with regular updates transmitted during the flight. Wi-fi connectivity on the Airbus A340-500 was launched in May last year, allowing passengers with wi-fi equipped laptops to check their emails during the flight.
The latest in-flight entertainment system, called ICE for information, entertainment and communications, features over 500 channels of entertainment all controllable by the passenger on-demand. Having met with very positive passenger reaction, ICE is already installed on over 20 per cent of the fleet and will be extended to all future aircraft joining the fleet.
By Jonna Simon