“The last six months will be remembered as one of the bleakest on record for the aviation industry,” said PAUL STARRS, British Airways’ commercial manager, Middle East.
“Across the board, our profits may be down but we’ve put in a good performance given the incredibly difficult trading conditions and our target remains to post a small profit for the financial year (April 2008 to March 2009).”
“Even though the industry has been affected globally, the Middle East continues to be a vitally important market for the airline. This is evident from an increase in Dubai services – we are now at three flights per day with a fourth daily flight, five times per week, to be added this month – and larger aircraft servicing the Dubai, Qatar and Bahrain routes during our current winter schedule,” he added.
BA has also recently announced a resumption of services to Saudi Arabia, both Riyadh and Jeddah five times per week.
Bookings for BA throughout the year – and especially during the current holiday season – remain positive according to Starrs.
This year BA still has plans to look to launching the new first class cabin. “The embodiment of new Club World across our Boeing 777 fleet will also be completed within the first six months of 2009.”
The single most important challenge the airline will be looking to overcome this year is “remaining profitable or breaking even in what is the harshest trading environment the industry has ever faced.”
Although competition was clearly evident in the Middle East, and could be seen in many forms, especially the prices customers are currently paying for tickets, Starrs felt that “competition is great, it is healthy, and I welcome it”.
ROBBIE BAIRD, regional director Middle East, Asia and the Pacific for British Airways said that their bookings on BA.com had been increasing for some time, and did tend to rise noticeably when there was a low promotional fare in the market. Online bookings in the Middle East however, were still low compared to the UK.
“Here in the Middle East, we see something like 24 per cent of our volume coming through ba.com,” he said.
BA’s fastest growing Middle East routes were Dubai followed by Bahrain where the Boeing 777 has been replaced with the bigger Boeing 747.
“Of the business we take out of the Middle East 50 per cent get off at London, and 50 per cent go on, the majority of the onward traffic going to the USA. Our North American network is a fantastic network with more than 20 destinations, all of them served at least daily and many served multiple times each day (such as New York which is served eight times per day),” said Baird.
The market strategy for this year was to “compete hard. We will have very competitive fares and we will encourage people to take advantage of these by booking early. The connecting opportunity beyond terminal 5 is a major focus and the extensive BA can get you to almost every part of the world via the most modern terminal on the planet.”