Face to Face: Eric Jelinek
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As Qantas completes its agreements with Emirates, Travel Daily catches up with its regional general manager for UK/Ireland Eric Jelinek.
Qantas is finalising its partnership with Emirates, what has changed for the airline as a result?
This new partnership provides our customers with a seamless international network and world-class travel experiences. In collaboration with Emirates we now fly from several UK ports including Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, offering our passengers additional connectivity outside London. From Australia, we can now offer our customers one-stop access to more than 30 destinations in Europe compared with the five we offered before.
In addition, our flights are now operating via the global hub of Dubai, en route to Australia. This means our passengers can not only discover this new destination but also enjoy the world class Terminal 3 at Dubai’s airport, purposefully designed for the A380 aircraft. It also opens up other destinations such as Africa and the Indian Ocean so we hope we will start to welcome new customers keen to travel to those places on the route.
With Emirates, we’re working together to align our fare products and package them as simply as possible. We have put a great deal of time and effort into making sure the proposition is clear, particularly for our trade partners.
So these regional connections are important to Qantas?
The new regional connections are very important to us. There is a vast amount of traffic to Dubai from Europe and obviously people would rather fly from the airport closet to where they live or work. Through this new partnership we now offer our customers the opportunity to fly to Dubai from their nearest Emirates gateway airport (or Qantas from London Heathrow) before connecting onto our award winning A380 service to Australia.
Emirates has built a huge support base from regional cities across the UK over time. We are already finding that our customers are booking the various connections and stopovers available via the Dubai hub.
Has there been any changes to the on-board product as a result of the Emirates deal?
Obviously we’re both keen to maintain the very highest standards of service and comfort for our passengers.
There has been a lot of work to align the key elements of what both airlines offer customers. But the target was never to create two identical airlines. There will naturally be differences between Qantas and Emirates – and that’s as it should be, for example, Qantas will continue to offer pyjamas in Business Class.
What matters is that people’s experience is broadly consistent in terms of standards, quality and conditions.
How do you plan to reach travel agents in the regions?
We recently embarked on a series of nationwide road shows with Emirates aimed at our UK travel trade partners operating in these new regions.
The roadshows will help us to inform and engage agents on the new partnership, the benefits, the products and services and showcase the network connectivity.
Aside from the Emirates partnership, what is the real focus for Qantas currently?
Returning our international business to profitability by 2015 is a huge focus for us. Since our partnership with Emirates began in March we have seen a positive change on the return on investment of our international flights from the UK and the future outlook is positive.
Historically we are seen as the airline of choice for the leisure market but we have continually invested more resources targeting the corporate market and we are now seeing the fruits of that investment.
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