Emirates restores regular flight schedules after Dubai floods

Emirates Airline has restored its regular flight schedules on Saturday (20 April), after unprecedented flooding disrupted flight movements in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) earlier this week. 

In an open letter, the airline's President Tim Clark apologised to every customer who has had their travel plans disrupted due to the recent extreme weather conditions.

"As of this morning, Saturday 20 April, our regular flight schedules have been restored. Passengers previously stranded in the airport transit area have been rebooked and are enroute to their destinations," he said.

"It will take us some more days to clear the backlog of rebooked passengers and bags, and we ask for our customers' patience and understanding," he added.

Emirates has put together a taskforce to sort, reconcile and deliver some 30,000 pieces of left-behind baggage to their owners.

On Tuesday (16 April), the UAE experienced its highest rainfall in 75 years. Lashing storm winds and rain disrupted activity across the cities. 

"We diverted dozens of flights to avoid the worst of the weather on Tuesday, and over the next three days we had to cancel nearly 400 flights and delay many more, as our hub operations remained challenged by staffing and supply shortages," Clark said.

To free up resources and capacity to manage impacted customers as a priority, Emirates had to suspend check-in for passengers departing Dubai, implement an embargo on ticket sales, and temporarily halt connecting passenger traffic from points across our network coming into Dubai.

"We deployed additional resources to aid our airport and contact centre teams with rebooking and put on additional flights to destinations where we identified large numbers of displaced customers," Clark added.