ITCA Update
Flight catering in the Middle East PETER JONES
ITCA chair of production and operations management, School of Management, University of Surrey.
Avid readers of this column will know that one of the things that I always emphasise in writing about the ‘global’ flight catering industry is that it is not really global at all. All our research in the Travel Catering Research Centre (TCRC) shows that there are fundamental structural differences between North America, Europe and Asia Pacific in terms of passenger volume, route networks, onboard service strategies, flight kitchen ownership, and so on. Readers interested in this can find it discussed in various reports we have published available online at
http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/travelcatering/. However, in conducting this research to date we have tended to lump the Middle East into the region we call Asia Pacific, so in this article I want to focus exclusively on this part of the world to reflect the ITCA Dubai Exhibition. The Middle East is forecast to be the fastest
growing region in the world in terms of passenger demand. Boeing (2010) estimates this growth between 2008 and 2028 to be 6.6 per cent - considerably higher than a forecast global growth of 4.9 per cent. Airbus (2010) has more detailed forecasts. They agree with Boeing that the Middle East will have the strongest growth of any part of the world in international traffic between 2009 and 2018 (6.6 per cent), with slightly lower growth in domestic and intra-regional traffic (5.2 per cent). However, Airbus’ forecast for the longer term is marginally lower than Boeing at 5.9 per cent.
Dubai International Airrport handles over 6,000 weekly flights operated by 130 airlines to over 220 destinations across six continents Whilst such percentage increases are interesting,
they have to be placed in the context of actual passenger volumes. Only two Middle Eastern airlines are in the world’s top 35 carriers by passenger volume – Emirates with 22 million passengers a year and Saudi Arabian Airlines with nearly 17 million. In comparison, seven of the top eleven airlines in the world operate out of North America and between them they carry 487 million passengers a year. Hence North America’s forecast growth of just over three per cent per year results in more than 367 million more passengers by 2028, whereas the Middle East’s 6 per cent growth translates into around 79 million more passengers. Of course, passenger numbers do not translate directly into demand for passenger meals. Such demand is affected by the duration of flights and the onboard service policies of the airlines flying them. In this respect, the Middle East is likely to see a stronger percentage growth in meal demand than North America. This is because the route network in the region comprises a relatively
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www.onboardhospitality.com
high number of international long haul flights, and the policy of Middle Eastern carriers is to provide a high degree of onboard service. To put it simply, if current trends continue demand for airline meals in North America might grow at less than one per cent whereas in the Middle East it may be over five per cent On the supply side, the Middle East shares many
of the characteristics of the wider Asia Pacific region. Each country has a national airline that is dominant in that market, operating out of a major hub airport. These airlines also tend to own and operate their own flight kitchens at their hub, so that global flight caterers as yet have limited penetration in these markets. One implication of this is that Middle Eastern
flight kitchens provision all the major carriers that operate through the region, and hence have insight into the style of onboard meals that their competitors are offering. It is perhaps this insight that enables Middle Eastern carriers to be rated some of the top airlines in the world. For
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