Testing causes missed flights; Dubai Airports CEO says tests should end soon
DXB reached 111% pre-Covid levels in December 2021, a sign that DWC will soon open
Testing requirements have become so onerous and lineups so long, with results sometimes take so long to arrive that some UAE passengers end up unable to board their flights despite agreements between health providers and the country’s airlines.
While in some cases these passengers are able to rebook without penalty, this is not always the case, as some tickets are non-refundable.
Meanwhile, Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths suggests pre-travel testing will soon become a think of the past. He says governments must stop interfering with the common-sense health regulations.
Griffiths has stated that we all must now learn to live with the virus, and that the ability to travel is a necessary part of the normalized approach to getting our lives back in the future. In an interview with CNN, the CEO stated: “The next stage is to be ready for the recovery... And the good thing is that we never really shut anything down. We put things into hibernation but we maintained a full state of readiness in order to springboard back into the real world when traffic starts to recover.”
According to Dubai Civil Aviation Authority (DCAA), DXB received 24 million international passengers during the first 11 months of 2021, including 3.88 million in November alone.
Dubai airport saw 40% growth over the six weeks leading up to the Christmas peak, and achieved 111% of pre-Covid levels in terms of arriving and departing passengers. This means Dubai World Central (DWC) will soon open again. Griffiths previously stated that DWC would be made operational once Dubai International (DXB) were to reach full capacity again, which it did with the opening of the final phase of Concourse A at Terminal 3 in mid-December 2021.
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