Emirates & Qatar Airways To Add More Wide-Body Service To Europe

Emirates A380 at LAX

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The Middle Eastern carriers are continuing to add more capacity to their flights between their home bases and Europe with Emirates and Qatar Airways both announcing new wide-body services this week.

Emirates To Add A380 Service To Vienna

From 1 July 2016 Emirates will be replacing a Boeing 777-300 on its Dubai – Vienna route with one of its 3-class Airbus A380 aircraft.

EK127 DXB 08:55 – 12:55 VIE (Daily A380 Service)
EK125 DXB 17:15 – 21:15 VIE (Daily 777-300 Service)

EK128 VIE 15:05 – 22:45 DXB (Daily A380 Service)
EK126 VIE 22:45 – 06:20+1 day DXB (Daily 777-300 Service)

The 3-class A380 that Emirates will use on this route comes with 14 First Class Suites. 76 Business Class seats and 427 Economy Class seats. The seat maps, courtesy of SeatGuru are below (click to expand)

emirates-a380-economy-seat-mapEmirates Economy Class Cabin on the lower deck of the Airbus A380emirates-a380-premium-cabins-seat-map

Emirates First & Business Class Cabins on the upper deck of the Airbus A380

This is a big increase in capacity on this route as the Emirates A380 Economy class cabin has comfortably more seats than the whole of the 777 aircraft that it’s replacing.

While the A380 will seat up to 517 passengers the 777 that currently operates this route can only carry up to 360 passengers and that gives a capacity increase of 44% – that’s a lot!

The number of First Class seats increases from 8 to 14 and the number of Business Class seats increases from 42 to 76 so, with a bit of luck, this will see award seats become easier to find.

There’s even good news for Economy Class passengers when you take a look at the seat dimensions:

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 17.25.24Those are some of the more spacious Economy Class seats you’ll find on any aircraft today and, while the aircraft swap doesn’t yield much improvement in seat pitch, Economy Class passengers will have an extra inch of seat width on the A380….and that can make a lot of difference on a long-haul flight.

Qatar Airways Schedules Dreamliner Service To Geneva

The last time Qatar Airways flew a wide-body service between Doha and Geneva was back in January 2014 when the airline used an Airbus A330 to operate the route. Since then, passengers have had to make do with a narrow-body Airbus A320 if they wanted to fly on Qatar Airways between the two cities.

From 1 July 2016 Qatar Airways will replace the A320 with one of its Boeing 787-8 Dreamliners.

Qatar Airways 787-8Qatar Airways 787-8 Dreamliner

The Dreamliner will take over the daily service between Doha and Geneva on the following schedule:

QR099 DOH 07:25 – 13:10 GVA
QR100 GVA 18:00 – 01:10+1 day DOH

This is a big upgrade to the service as it sees capacity almost doubled from 132 seats to 254 – that’s a staggering increase in capacity and can only help keep fares where consumers like them – low.

Premium cabin travelers should be happy as, not only does the Business Class seat count increase from 12 to 22 (should be good for award availability), but the 787-8 comes with Qatar Airways’ excellent newer Business Class seat:

Qatar Airways 787-8Qatar Airways Business Class Seat – 787-8 Dreamliner

The news for Economy Class passengers isn’t so good.

Both the A320 and the Qatar Airways 787-8 Dreamliner offer just 31″ of seat pitch (leg room) but the seat width in the Dreamliner is almost an inch less than in the Airbus…and that’s a definite downgrade.

[HT: airlineroute.net]

Bottom Line

Say what you like about the Middle Eastern Airlines but they know how to take the game to the opposition. In 2016 alone Emirates has been deploying more and more A380 aircraft to its routes with Amsterdam, Düsseldorf & Munich and London being just 4 examples of European routes seeing significant capacity increases and, elsewhere, Los Angeles, Dallas and Bangkok all getting a visit from the Emirates A380.

Qatar Airways has been less aggressive with capacity increases but it has still been busy deploying its new Dreamliners on a whole variety of routes (like Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penn) and adding services to new cities like Birmingham in the UK.

I’m really not sure where the big Middle Eastern airlines think all the passengers are going to come from to fill all these aircraft but, presumably, they have data showing that the routes will work…I guess we’ll see in time.

Personally I don’t think there’s enough demand out there to make all these wide-body services viable in the long-term (especially when the price of oil goes up) but I really don’t care. More capacity means more pressure on prices and, as a consumer, that’s music to my ears.

 

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