DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 124

gulf neighbors got into a quarrel with Dubai. The regional airline company Gulf Air, then
backed by Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Oman, wanted Dubai to pay it subsidies and
give special concessions. Sheikh Rashid wasn't happy with the demand, and when he re-
fused to accept these conditions, the airline cut back services to Dubai.
That could have put a severe dent in Dubai's plans for tourism, so the sheikh made
the wildly risky decision to create an airline just for Dubai that he named Emirates. With
$10 million and the help of two British expatriate airline experts, he put his son Sheikh
Mohammed, the current ruler, in charge of starting up Emirates and turning it into the
region's star carrier.
That was 1986—an auspicious moment in tourism and all the stars aligned in Dubai's
favor. Just as Emirates was getting off the ground, the world opened up after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. By the 1990s previously closed economies were jumping into the world
markets, especially in Asia: China, India, and Southeast Asia. Emirates saw an opening
and got landing rights to fly into these newly developing countries, especially the second-
and third-tier cities that had only known puddle-jumper airlines, what the industry called
“under-served areas,” which became lucrative markets when the middle classes started fly-
ing, on Emirates Airlines.
More advanced technology allowed the airline company to focus on Africa and Europe
and eventually North America. Thanks to that gift of geography, Dubai now served a mar-
ket of 2 billion people living within four hours by plane and another four billion within
seven hours. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, long-haul jets can fly nonstop for up
to 16 hours, and Emirates Airlines could offer nonstop flights to Washington from Dubai,
or to Sydney and even to São Paulo.
“Dubai completely changed the rules of the game,” said Richard Quest, the CNN an-
chor and airlines correspondent whom I met when we both spoke at a tourism conferen-
ce in Abu Dhabi. Quest said it would be hard to underestimate how central the airports
and airlines have been in transforming Dubai into a world-class tourism destination, how
Dubai willed itself to become one of the major hubs in the airline world. In a few years, it
could be the hub.
The very weakness of Dubai—a blank canvas, in the middle of nowhere with a tiny
population, no claim on a great history or culture, and an archaic government—became
its strengths in the tourist industry. And the loosening global marketplace meant Dubai
had access to cheap labor and all that oil money to finance the venture.
Emirates Airlines is wholly owned by the government and spent the billions of dollars
necessary to eventually buy a fleet of the best airplanes. (No airplane is older than five
years by company policy.) It has been profitable from the start. Further, Emirates can offer
“world-class service” at reasonable rates below that of the competition because its costs are
much lower. And since citizen complaints about the noise or environmental impact of air-