Fast-growing flydubai keeps up its speed

A flydubai plane on the tarmac at Terminal 2 of the Dubai International airport in Dubai.

The budget airline flydubai is vowing no let-up in its rapid expansion as it adds four destinations and says it may launch nine other routes by the end of the year. The carrier began services to Istanbul last Thursday, Latakia in Syria on Sunday, Karachi on Monday and Colombo yesterday after receiving another new Boeing 737-800NG, bringing its fleet to nine aircraft and its route network to 21 cities served from Dubai.

The airline's rapid growth - it says it has sold nearly 1 million tickets in its one year of operation - is serving to validate the business model for budget airlines. The carriers stimulate demand for regional air travel by offering lower prices than are offered by full-service airlines, which provide more amenities but also have higher operating costs. Ghaith al Ghaith, the chief executive of flydubai, said the airline was coming of age and "ticking off all the right milestones".

"If we were here to take the same passengers for less money, we would not be contributing much," Mr al Ghaith said. "But low-cost airlines such as flydubai allow more people to travel, more often." Statistics provided by the airline seem to support the claim. Since flydubai started operations last year, traffic between Dubai and Beirut has increased by 33 per cent, Dubai-Amman traffic is up 40 per cent, and Dubai-Egypt traffic gained 22 per cent, Mr al Ghaith said.

The growth of flydubai and other carriers has kept the Middle East in the limelight of the global airline industry, which is making a slow recovery rather than the upward sprint exhibited by certain Middle East carriers. This month, Qatar Airways said it would start services to six cities in Asia and Europe from its base in Doha. The new destinations are Phuket, Hanoi, Nice, Bucharest, Budapest and Brussels.

Emirates Airline placed an US$11.5 billion (Dh42.23bn) order for new A380s from Airbus at the Berlin Air Show this month, while Air Arabia began operating from Egypt - its third base in the MENA region - and said it would also establish a base in Jordan. Etihad Airways is expected to announce new routes when it begins receiving deliveries from its 100-aircraft order in the next two years. The pace of flydubai's growth - it has launched a new route every 2.5 weeks on average - is also a coup in its efforts to gain traffic rights in a region long considered to be protective and restrictive.

The UAE allows foreign airlines unrestricted access, although some nations in the region have blocked them from their markets to protect their flag carriers. One of the 17 nations flydubai serves is India, which initially granted but then postponed access for the Dubai airline for a year to allow the country's ailing domestic airlines to recover from the global downturn. India and neighbouring Pakistan are major markets for flydubai, the aims of which will certainly call for serving a dozen or more cities in each country.

"Things are improving," Mr al Ghaith said. "They are not as bad as they used to be, but they are still not perfect." Saudi Arabia is also on flydubai's horizon, and Mr al Ghaith said the carrier would begin service there "as soon as it is going to be available for us". @Email:[e-mail]