This past week has been one of the most challenging in Emirates’ history in terms of operational reliability. Dubai saw one of the worst storms in decades, wreaking havoc on Emirates’ operation. Even once conditions improved, the operation couldn’t recover quickly, both in terms of flights departing as planned, and in terms of being able to accommodate passengers (due to capacity constraints).
With all that has happened, the company is now issuing an apology, promising that things will start to improve.
Emirates President Tim Clark issues an apology
Emirates President Tim Clark has today published an open letter, apologizing to customers for what has happened at the airline in recent days. I think it’s worth worth sharing the letter in its entirety, as it’s quite well written and thorough:
To all our valued customers,
This week has been one of the toughest for Emirates operationally, as record storms hit the United Arab Emirates.
I would like to offer our most sincere apologies to every customer who has had their travel plans disrupted during this time.
On Tuesday 16 April, the UAE experienced its highest rainfall in 75 years. Lashing storm winds and rain disrupted activity across the cities. Our 24/7 hub in Dubai remained open, with flight movements reduced for safety, but flooded roads impeded the ability of our customers, pilots, cabin crew, and airport employees to reach the airport, and also the movement of essential supplies like meals and other flight amenities.
We diverted dozens of flights to avoid the worst of the weather on Tuesday, and over the next 3 days we had to cancel nearly 400 flights and delay many more, as our hub operations remained challenged by staffing and supply shortages.
We were clear on our 2 priorities: Look after our customers who have been impacted by the disruption and get our operations back on schedule.
To free up resources and capacity to manage impacted customers as a priority, we had to suspend check-in for passengers departing Dubai, implement an embargo on ticket sales, and temporarily halt connecting passenger traffic from points across our network coming into Dubai.
We deployed additional resources to aid our airport and contact centre teams with rebooking and put on additional flights to destinations where we identified large numbers of displaced customers.
We sent over 100 employee volunteers to look after disrupted customers at Dubai Airport departures and in the transit area, prioritising medical cases, the elderly and other vulnerable travellers. To date, over 12,000 hotel rooms were secured to accommodate disrupted customers in Dubai, 250,000 meal vouchers have been issued, and more quantities of drinking water, blankets, and other amenities.
Behind the scenes, it was all hands-on deck for thousands more employees across the organisation to get our operations back on track.
As of this morning, Saturday 20 April, our regular flight schedules have been restored. Passengers previously stranded in the airport transit area have been rebooked and are enroute to their destinations. We have put together a taskforce to sort, reconcile, and deliver some 30,000 pieces of left-behind baggage to their owners.
It will take us some more days to clear the backlog of rebooked passengers and bags, and we ask for our customers’ patience and understanding.
We know our response has been far from perfect. We acknowledge and understand the frustration of our customers due to the congestion, lack of information, and confusion in the terminals. We acknowledge that the long queues and wait times have been unacceptable.
We take our commitment to our customers very seriously, and we have taken learnings from the last few days to make things right and improve our processes.
I’d like to also acknowledge and thank our teams across the airline, and our many suppliers and partners for their tireless efforts around the clock this week, despite the challenging conditions, to support customers, recover our network, and bring our operating schedule back to normal.
Finally, and once again, I want to offer, on behalf of myself, and all the teams across Emirates, our apologies to each and every customer affected by this disruption.
We will continue to work hard to live up to your expectations, and to our Fly Better brand promise.
My take on Emirates’ meltdown & apology
People often joke that Dubai can’t handle a bit of rain. While I’d say that’s somewhat true, the city in this case dealt with a massive amount of rain, which would cause disruptions just about anywhere.
Dubai is a very reliable airport hub, given that it rarely deals with weather events, as there aren’t snowstorms, or hurricanes, or tornadoes. So Emirates dealing with an operational meltdown due to weather conditions is exceptionally rare.
The effort of stabilizing operations is also a monumental task. When you’re running an airline that consistently has high load factors, with a vast majority of passengers connecting, it makes it very hard to get everyone where they need to go in a timely fashion. While the airline is now back to operating a regular schedule, it doesn’t change the fact that many travelers are still stranded in Dubai and are waiting to be rebooked, given that Emirates can’t suddenly double capacity overnight.
I appreciate the way that Clark’s apology is written, as the company actually takes accountability for many of the issues, which many airlines wouldn’t do.
Bottom line
Emirates had one of its toughest weeks ever when it comes to operational reliability, as Dubai was hit with its worst storm in decades. The airline has struggled to recover from this, given the high percentage of transit passengers that the airline carries, leaving a countless number of people stranded in Dubai.
While flight schedules are starting to normalize, there’s still a major backlog of people who need to get to their destination.
Were any OMAAT readers caught up in this Emirates mess?
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