It’s a WOW.

There was something unreal about the news I saw in several sources. The Emirates have posted record revenue boosts. The article (source Reuters) gives us “Dubai’s Emirates airline on Monday reported full-year profit up more than 60% at 17.23 billion dirhams ($4.69 billion), comfortably beating the previous year’s 10.6 billion dirhams” 

We can ‘deduce’ from that that they almost beat their last year target by 60%, that amounts to something. Because of some options in Dubai and Abu Dhabi I tend to keep an eye on anything UAE, so this was a whopper of an achievement. Then we get the additional “The state-owned airline will pay its staff a bonus equivalent to 20 weeks’ salary” which is big. I never recall BA or KLM doing anything like it, or Air France for that matter. Good people is about keeping them happy and the prospect of 20 weeks of vacation does just that. Your quality of life goes up. Take that with a previous article I mentioned about the recruitment drive that they have going implies that the run on Emirati jobs will increase rather dramatically. Now in light of Dubai Airport where everything is large, smooth and well catered to implies that it should drive tourism even further. Dubai is already one of the largest airports in the world, currently number 2 after Atlanta Georgia, but that will not last long. There is a new wave happening and I reckon that when they upgrade their Customer Service Systems (my speculation) the formula changes even further. Consider that arrival in Dubai also triggers the Hotel, so they know that you are coming, taking one queue partially away from you. We see all these software vendor scream AI whilst bullying you into installing add-ons (Google), or Advertising you to death (Microsoft) and they probably never considered to look at the foundations of Customer Care in tourism and travel. Weird isn’t it? 

A stage where some think “it is part of the journey, part of the pain”, and no one considered that this pain could be dealt with. Should the UAE and optionally Saudi Arabia deal with that pain places like France, UK, EU and USA will have a much larger issue. It isn’t that their sights aren’t worth seeing. It becomes a setting where it takes a lot more effort to see them. The first hurdle for any tourist. And it is a simple setting of one hand feeding the other. In 5 years the tourist picture will look very different. I wonder when some will catch on to what Emirates is currently achieving.