Emirates gets cold shoulder from Germany
 

May 20 (Reuters) - Germany's transport ministry is giving Emirates, the cold shoulder by refusing to hold talks on granting the Dubai-based airline rights to land in Berlin, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported on Friday.

"There are no negotiations," daily Handelsblatt cited a German government source as saying.

Emirates has been aggressively expanding its route network, provoking fears that Gulf-based superjumbos will draw traffic from European carriers' hubs.

Read further: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...74J06720110520

And more http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...70G01R20110117

Seems like Lufthansa lobbying to block EK from extending and flying from ore destinations in Germany!

Maybe LH should re-think this move then...

Lufthansa puts Airbus A380 on Singapore-Frankfurt

LH have always had a cry about EK. Yet they seem to leave their problems with capacity to certain destinations blowing in the wind...

Both carriers are allowed a maximum of 4 destinations to the other country. Emirates makes use of all 4 of them already: DUS, FRA, HAM, MUC

Typical backward governmental corporatist approach.

For consumers, nothing good comes from Germany's government being under the sway of LH like this.

I'd welcome increased liberalization of international air travel such that we'd get a lot more competition sooner than later.

I wonder if Berlin is really a huge market - for instance, QR has been flying to Berlin for years, yet they are still just deploying 1 narrow-gauaged (daily I think), unlike FRA or MUC where they can expand to more than once daily (on a wide-gauged). Even Air Berlin, with Berlin as its hub, has to have significant operations from MUC (not sure if they have a similar scale our of FRA).

Viewing from this perspective, the barring may be to protect a medium market from unhealthy competition.

I suppose you can pull from the nearby German cities (e.g. Dresden). If you are living in western Poland it's probably close enough (compared to flying out of Hamburg or Prague).

+1