Emirates sees growth in Silicon Valley-S India link

Thiruvananthapuram: Dubai-based Emirates is seeing bullish prospects in linking California's Silicon Valley with its Indian counterpart, Bangalore, via Dubai. Airline officials say that the IT sector boom in India, particularly in the southern Indian states, had led to a strong demand for an international link connecting the tech centers in India with San Francisco.
Emirates officials said load factors for San Francisco from Dubai and India were as high as 70-80%, and that bookings received by Emirates to San Francisco from India since its launch had grown to approximately 6% of total bookings in the market. Emirates had launched a Dubai-SFO direct flight in December, which in turn has connections originating from different Indian destinations.
Officials said the performance of the airline's SFO sector was on line with the expectations of the airline, and that consistently high load factors proved that.
Emirates claims it offers the shortest link from different Indian destinations to the West Coast of the US via Dubai, with a minimum connection time of 22 hours and 40 minutes from Chennai as against a maximum of 23 hours from Bangalore.
Emirates presently offers 163 flights per week to Dubai from 10 Indian destinations. Mumbai (35 flights per week) and Delhi (25) lead in absolute numbers, but south Indian destinations account for the most number of flights with Hyderabad (21), Bangalore (20), Chennai (19) and Kochi (14) totaling 74 flights per week. In addition, Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode have 14 flights per week to Dubai between them.
26/02/09 Economic Times

To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline

Categories: Foreign Feb 2009