Annual Report 2008-2009 - Emirates.com

12
Emirates The Airline
Emirates A380 - the exclusive onboard Lounge
Commercial Operations
Despite the tough recession, Commercial
Operations continued to expand by offering a
wider range of flights and destinations, opening
new offices, and introducing additional online
self-service options, while carefully monitoring
trading conditions to ensure that customers
continued to receive value for money.
Online sales via emirates.com for the year
amounted to AED 4.42 billion (US$1.2 billion),
which represents 73 per cent growth on
2007/08. A total of 896,838 bookings were
made online and an average of 9,244 passenger
segments were booked per day, an increase of
80 per cent over last year.
For the first time, the division introduced multicurrency
pricing on the newly-developed
booking engine as well as the Best Price pledge,
promising to offer the lowest price on any
Emirates flight on any website, as well as
introducing a Skywards Miles upgrade facility.
The division also introduced pre-departure
notifications on mobile phones, the launch of
Business Rewards, which enables small businesses
to accumulate Skywards Miles, as well as the
ability to book a number of low cost carriers’
services on emirates.com. Arabic, Turkish and
Greek booking engines were also launched.
New offices were opened in Los Angeles,
Muscat, Sanaa, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Jeddah
and Kuwait. Globally, Emirates commercial
contact centres and reservations offices receive
21 calls every minute and answer 85.3 per cent
of them in under 20 seconds.
From centralising the reservations office for
China in Guangzhou to increasing capacity
in most offices, Emirates strove to make the
telephone booking experience as efficient as
possible. Additionally, for customers without
convenient internet access, self-service kiosks
were installed in the UAE in each retail hub.
During the year, approximately 13 million calls
were answered.
In India, the chauffeur-drive service was
introduced in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and
Bengaluru while in Damascus, a new daily
bus service was introduced from the capital to
Aleppo via Homs and Hamah.
Skywards membership crossed the four million
mark with a new member enrolling every 41
seconds.
In Dubai International airport’s new Emirates
Terminal 3, Skywards Silver members travelling
in Economy Class now have a special check-in
service.