Does Emirates Negotiate Corporate Contracts?
 

Do airlines (specifically Emirates) negotiate much discount for corporate contracts or can the same fares be found online or through a travel agent?

Yes, lots of companies have corporate contacts with airlines. There may or may not be much of a discount, but they have better T&Cs. For example, a normally non-flexible fare would be fully flexible on a corporate contract.

My own experience suggests that they only negotiate contracts for companies that have a huge amount of travel in Business and First. Millions of dollars per year and not tens or hundreds of thousands.

That was my impression as well. I would suspect we're spending just over $1mm annually and did not expect they'd be wanting to negotiate a corporate contract, but one of our travel representatives believes we can. I'm not sure we'd see much benefit but I guess it doesn't hurt to explore further...

My employer has a major contract with EK with a bunch of folks on a flight out of BOM, BLR and MAA every day. This contract has helped me get a seat at a few hours notice even on flights where EK itself has stopped selling seats on its website.

Actually, my experience with EK is that they will look at corporate contracts which start at US$500K annual spend. They factor in routes/segments flown and even if your company is using a TMC (travel management company) they simply allocate a unique corporate code and you book travel as normal.

Discounts range from 7-10% - not on Y fares, but on J/F and it is route dependent. They will also consider comping Gold cards to a handful of execs if need be.

You can often do better than the corporate fare codes by having a wide look. I managed J fares on 380 MAN-DXB-JNB rtn for £1450 per head last year and £1780 for LGW-DXB-HKG this year. The first was with trailfinders in the UK and the second an independent in London.

My organisation had a bucket fare of £2100 per head on the JNB routing. Not sure what the 2014 price is mind.

From what I have gleaned they will negotiate in markets where a lot of competition exist with similar propositions, but in more class defined markets where service is markedly different between carriers, they tend not to unless on a big surge into that market place.

Not always true - We have a corp contract (I have a private small-mid size company based in Dubai) We come close to a million US a year (+/- 20%) but thats all for myself and 3 other travelers. We have had a corp contract since 1999. Perhaps they don't offer new corp contracts for companies that spend as "little" as we do but other then a few minor changes to the wording every year, we have always gotten the same percentage off of First and business class travel and its been 15 years now

I guess it depends on who you deal with. Our spend with EK totals between USD1m and USD2m per year (through agents mainly) and we have tried three times over the years to get a corporate contract without success. My travel manager tells me each time that it is because we do not spend enough in First and Business (about 25%). Etihad on the other hand work very proactively with us on lower numbers than that with a corporate contract.

Thanks for all of the information. Do the business discounts apply for all business class fare codes or only J & C?

My question is if discount business fares are still potentially cheaper than what you can obtain through the corporate contracts?

YES and NO We get a substantial discount on full fare First and Business fares and a much lower discount on cheaper first and business fares. Whats changed this year (First time EK did this in a contract with us since 1999 is we get the same discount for flights ex DXB but a slightly lower discount for flights ex Other stations. Our sales rep explained that with EK, there are to many work arounds to get lower F fares (example is CMB-DXB-USA at around $6000 r/t in First (with stop over in DXB) Thats a hell of a savings, especially if you do business in CMB as well as the US

You could get similar pricing ex-India as well, but that's been almost constant for the past several years, though increased a bit lately. Ideally, you'd like to catch even better fares....

ex India has gone up substantially over the past year. on EK SQ has much better F fares ex India then EK (problem is I ned to stop in Dubai, not SIN). These things change all the time. 2 years ago you could fly ex/ ICN to JFK with stops in DXB for under $5000 r/t. When I bough the same ticket a few months ago it was closer to $8K

My experience confirms what others said before: EK (and EY in my experience) are much more hesitant offering good corporate contracts to Dubai-based companies than LH or AF/KL. Case in point: my firm had single digit business class discounts with EK/EY while they were well in the double digits with foreign airlines.

I think EK simply does not want to wash out its Dubai "captive traveler" cash cow, and it does not have to.

It would be interesting to see what kind of discounts they offer to European-based companies (I bet hefty discounts!).

Why would they differentiate corporate discounts between Europe and USA?