dwugson

Sorry, I was misinformed.

pokeable

Guess we are flying KE on our annual international trips.

Afterall

Precisely.

It will be interesting when someone analyzes the loss of productivity.

alanslegal

I have made a decision to never visit the USA whilst this joker of a president remains in the White House. With 11 visits in the past 10 years to the USA as a leisure traveller from Australia, he can make America Great Again without any of my holiday spending input, ableit only a tiny discretionary spending. Well at least now I can focus on hitting my 60th country sometime in 2017 as I have more time travelling elsewhere.

That said, cargo hold with potentially 100's of Lithium batteries is scary, scary, scary. Although I won't be flying to the USA anytime soon, it potentially affects ALL of us as there will no doubt be passengers who are connecting to an affected US bound flight and would likely have had to check-in their laptops/tablets/etc on the preceding flight to the US.

And any wanna-be-maniac who wants to do bad things to the USA, well would just fly another airline that's not affected. Remember which airlines were used in September 11 and this new ban looks ridiculous.

Cofyknsult

Not sure about EK but QR in Doha has a pretty good systematic secondary inspection on all US bound flights at the gate. I do not seee whay EK could not do the same.

I am not among the 3 ME carrier bashers, far from it, but someone there has played a clever card.

mishkira

just thinking about positives if any from this ban.

Any views how many busines class passengers (who have to carry laptops in hand laggage) would switch from EK/QR to other airlines, and thus ME3 carriers would have to slash business class fares in the near future to fill in their suddenly empty J cabins?

i plan to make a leasure flight to the US next month and I dont mind to use J flat beds to sleep on the plane rather than clicking laptop buttons ;-)

Any views and tips are welcome

kq747

I think it is waaaaay too early to tell if this will have a significant effect on business class pricing. It really depends on how this is practically handled by airlines and airports concerned, and whether the ban in fact inconveniences enough travelers that there is a large drop in J class demand. We simply won't know until the ban has been in place for some time and travel normalises under the new rules before airlines make decisions about this and I don't see it happening in less than a month.

Metanoia

I have a feeling the ME3 will come up with some very creative ways to mitigate the impact to their load factors.

nwflyboy

Boy, I'm not so sure about that. I work for a large tech company, with major sites in North America, and a huge presence in India. Large numbers of employees travel between North America and India all the time. Most people I know prefer the ME3 airlines for those trips for a variety of reasons. And those people are not going to easily give up access to their laptops for the day or two that it takes to transit back. I can also easily imagine that it becomes a corporate policy to choose a different airline, not just because of the potential "loss" of a day of productivity, but also because of the concerns over corporate laptops (with proprietary info stored on them) being stolen. Yeah, there's encryption and other measures (many of which are already in place) but if the perception is that under the new policy, you not only "lose a day" because you've been denied access to your laptop, but that there's a significantly greater chance your company laptop is going to get pilfered....I can easily see the mandate to switch to a different carrier.

Of course, the real question is, will this islamic electronics ban be extended to all carriers eventually...

What fun it must be to be a business traveler who is already overseas, lugging along a laptop, iPad and camera...and to discover as you are about to check in for your flight home that all the goodies much now get tossed into the checked baggage hold (especially after you have already checked your bags...).

Good times ahead...

Metanoia

I can see my company going towards laptops on loan in our destination offices - there's nothing that I need that can't be gotten from our private cloud/internal services. That kills two birds - the laptop issue, as well as the data theft issue, since laptops won't be crossing borders anymore.

And if I'm honest with myself, I don't work a single minute on the return flight to the US - I am way too tired. My strategy is to stay awake the whole night until after the breakfast service on the morning-departure US flights to reset back to my home time zone and get work done when it matters - in the office the next day.

And I don't work on the way over anyways - after dinner, and a few drinks at the bar, I sleep!

shuuy

So I'm flying Australia-DXB-USA on Saturday.

When do I have to check-in my laptop? In Sydney, or in Dubai?

m3red

I agree and won't be going to the US until he's out.

The ban clearly has some political element to it otherwise why would the uk not enforce this ban against EK?

This will clearly be very damaging to EK - Sir Tim said bookings were down 35% to the US - I can't see this getting any better. They better load a few more bottles of DOM given there is nothing else to do...

saneman

Here is the big problem with Emirates. A lot of layovers can be for more than a couple of hours. What do these idiots at Homeland Security think I should do for my entire time at the airport? The laptop ban is stupid. The IPad bad is even worse.

airsurfer

A very long detour.
Straight over the ocean is faster and has no laptop ban.

skywardhunter

Posted by NOIR in the construction thread:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-22/emirates-to-let-travelers-keep-laptops-tablets-until-boarding