The airline suspended scheduled flights of foreign passengers in March following the COVID-19 outbreak, cancelling thousands of flights.
During the seven-month era that began in April, Emirates received, validated and processed approximately 1. 7 million claims, the airline said.
This led the airline to return AED 6. 3 billion ($1. 7 billion) in refunds to its consumers. Of this amount, AED 4. 7 billion was reimbursed to consumers who had booked directly with the airline, and the rest was backed by agencies.
In addition, Emirates has dealt with more than 130,000 claims from consumers and spouse agencies and replaced the prestige of nearly four million flight vouchers.
In the more sensible case of its project, Emirates had 110 workers committed to validating and processing refunds, a large build on the pre-pandemic team of 19, and the airline has controlled this by moving internally from other purposes to assist in this business.
“In the early months of 2020, COVID-19 particularly interrupted worldwide and resulted in an unprecedented volume of refund claims in aviation and industry, in addition to Emirates,” said Sir Tim Clark, president of Emirates Airline.
“This was not a scenario an airline wanted, especially when it was also facing a shortage of money due to particularly small operations. During those difficult months, when we faced the effect of the pandemic on our business, we never lost sight of our commitment to our customers.
“Thanks to the efforts of our refunds and visitor service teams, the cooperation of our partners and the understanding of our visitors, Emirates has eliminated our accumulation of refunds. We still have higher volumes of refunds and flight coupon replacement requests compared to the pre-pandemic period, but we now have the ability to serve them within seven days. “