On Tuesday Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Dubai Executive Council Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum announced that business activities in the Emirates will gradually reopen from May 27. Airports are one of the services slated to reopen tomorrow, alongside retail outlets and malls, health clinics, government service centres, gyms and cinemas.
Dubai Airport, one of the world’s biggest transit and air-freight hubs, will once again be able to “facilitate transit passengers and travellers to other destinations,” according to WAM news agency, after being shuttered except for air-freight and repatriation services since March 25.
Tourism is crucial to the Dubai economy, and Dubai Airport’s CEO Paul Griffiths has sought to reassure potential visitors that airports are safe and Dubai is ready to welcome travellers again.
“Dubai International Airport is prepared to welcome visitors as soon as airports around the word start reopening and pave the way for a phased resumption of air services,” Griffiths said on Wednesday, March 27.
“As health and hygiene standards will play an influential role in encouraging people to travel, we have put in place a set of health and safety protocols at our airports including all necessary quarantine arrangements and the implementation of sanitisation and disinfection measures to reassure tourists that Dubai is one of the safest destinations to visit,” he said.
Additional safety measures adopted include the installation of protective plexiglass at check-in and immigration counters, body-heat detectors, social distancing markers, and increased levels of sanitisation, according to Dubai Airports’ latest COVID-19 update. A number of cafes and restaurants have also reopened to service airport users.
Travellers should not get too excited though as only a handful of Emirates Airline flights are operating out of Terminal 3 at Dubai Airport, in addition to vital cargo and emergency evacuation flights. As well as ad-hock flights, a regular schedule of outbound flights to London Heathrow, Frankfurt, Paris, Milan, Madrid, Chicago, Toronto, Sydney and Melbourne resumed on May 21.