In an interview with CNN’s Richard Quest, the Chief Executive of Dubai Airports, Paul Griffiths, discussed the ongoing recovery of the aviation industry and how Dubai Airport is currently experiencing pre-Covid numbers.
Speaking on Quest Means Business live from Expo 2020 Dubai, Griffiths also predicted that Covid testing at airports will end in the near future.
Key Quotes:
On the current testing policies and the failure to have a common policy by regulators:
“I think the thing is, once the testing regime becomes history, which I think it will do shortly, what we believe is going to happen is there will be a very strong recovery. And we need governments to stop interfering with the common-sense health regulations that are now emerging in the wake of the response to the latest strains of the virus.”
On the recovery of the aviation industry and how Dubai is handling the next stage of the pandemic:
“I think the pessimism of the uncertainty that we’ve been facing has to give way to the opportunistic, and optimism of recovery that we’re going to follow, and the good thing is, we never really shut anything down. We put things into hibernation, but we maintained a full state of readiness in order to be able to springboard back into the real world when traffic starts to recover. And we’ve seen that, we’ve seen 40 percent growth over a six-week period just before the Christmas peak… On a point-to-point basis, visitors to Dubai through the airport at 111 percent of what they were pre-COVID.”
On whether he expects those numbers to remain:
“The good thing is you see, having built confidence in Dubai as a destination, the actual multiplier effects of the origin and destination traffic to the economy is hugely valuable, but now what’s happened because of that attractiveness, when the transfer markets come back, we will be in an incredibly strong position to resume our pre-eminence with the sixth freedom as well as this point-to-point market.”
