The United Kingdom has always been an important market for the Middle Eastern giants Emirates and Qatar Airways. Both carriers operate flights to multiple destinations within the UK from their hubs at Dubai International Airport (DXB) and Doha Hamad International Airport (DOH).
Within the airlines’ UK operations, flights to London Heathrow Airport (LHR) have the highest frequencies, thus placing DXB-LHR and DOH-LHR among some of the busiest route pairings in the world.
Dubai-Heathrow
Data from Cirium show that in August, Dubai-based Emirates hold the top spot for serving LHR with the highest seat capacity. This is not surprising considering that Emirates operates six daily flights to LHR using the world’s largest passenger aircraft, the Airbus A380. Thus, Emirates offers a staggering 92,192 seats on this route and operates 186 flights in total for the month of August.
Because of the high-capacity aircraft deployed on this route, the Available Seat Mile (ASM) for the airline is 315,296,640.
EK-007 | EK-001 | EK-029 | EK-031 | EK-003 | EK-005 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
DXB departure | 02:30 | 07:45 | 09:40 | 11:25 | 14:15 | 15:45 |
LHR arrival | 07:05 | 12:25 | 14:25 | 16:10 | 18:40 | 20:15 |
Doha-Heathrow
In second place comes Qatar Airways, with the second-highest seat capacity offered to London Heathrow. With 45 weekly flights operated on this route, the carrier will operate 208 flights in total. This equates to the total number of seats made available by the airline as 81,226 and available seat miles of 264,796,760 for the duration of August.
The carrier deploys various widebody aircraft on this route, including the A380, the Airbus A350, and the Boeing 777 aircraft types.
QR-011 | QR-009 (3x weekly) | QR-003 | QR-007 | QR-001 | QR-015 | QR-005 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
DOH departure | 01:05 | 01:40 | 07:55 | 08:50 | 12:40 | 15:05 | 16:40 |
LHR arrival | 06:25 | 07:00 | 13:15 | 14:10 | 18:00 | 20:25 | 22:00 |
While the UK is an important market to Emirates and Qatar Airways, both carriers give greater focus to serving multiple London gateways.