Dubai Airport: 3,500 jobs to come up as Terminal 1 reopens

About 3,500 jobs will be created as a result of the reopening of Terminal 1 at Dubai International Airport (DXB) this week, said Paul Griffiths, CEO of Dubai Airports.

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These jobs will be created by DXB, airlines and the airport’s other partners who will be resuming operations.

“It is going to be more jobs for Dubai. Passenger service remain very much a personal thing at DXB and we are going to hire people, bringing back handling agents. Airlines are clearly going to do that," Griffiths said

"Moving 66 airlines across to Terminal 1 means a huge amount of activity. It means we’ll need more people to manage check-in desks and help people through the process.”

“And our commercial partners are clearly seeing a surge in recovery. Some jobs are waiting to be reactivated and some of them are going to be hired,” he added.

Dubai International Airport is expected to grow eight per cent to 28 million this year on the back of the reopening of Terminal 1 from June 24. The move will add 18 million to its passenger capacity.

Terminal 1 will reopen following 15-months of closure in the wake of last year's Covid-19 outbreak.

Griffiths expects a flood of demand as the air travel sector recovers and countries reopen their borders.

“Governments around the world are starting to manage the Covid situation rather than avoid it... with school holidays, Eid Al Adha, Expo 2020 coming up in the UAE, we see a huge rebound for inbound and outbound travel over the next few months,” said Griffiths.

“We have taken the opportunity to reopen Terminal 1 from June 24 which will see transition of 66 airlines that are currently operating from Terminal 3 back to Terminal 1. That gives PCR testing capacity on arrival and also helps deliver better service,” he said.

“By autumn, we will be back to close to 90 per cent of the original capacity that we operated pre-pandemic, as the outlook is positive because the EU is looking to introduce vaccine passport and positive noises are also coming out of the US."

"The cautious reopening up of Nigeria, South Africa and India clearly will open up some transfer flows through DXB International. The outlook is cautiously optimistic based on the some of the trends we are seeing now,” Griffiths told Bloomberg in an interview.

In 2020, passenger traffic plummeted 70 per cent to 25.9 million from 86.4 million in 2019.

Griffiths added that the new state-of-the-art laboratory at Dubai International will give Covid-19 test results a quick turnaround time.

“We are looking at methods to give even faster results. And the validation of certificates is something that we are looking at with IATA and various other countries,” he said.

• Dubai