United Arab Emirates (UAE) carrier Emirates Airlines is to boost capacity on its route between its Dubai International Airport hub and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport in the West Bengal capital of Kolkata, during the summer 2015 schedule, boosting its weekly capacity by 17.4 per cent.

Emirates confirms it will introduce a 13th weekly rotation on the route from March 29, 2015, by launching a new Wednesday flight on its afternoon ‘EK572’ departure from Dubai and late evening ‘EK573’ return service from the Indian city. This will mean this second daily flight, operated by an Airbus A330-200, will be flown every day except Tuesdays

Alongside the new rotation, Emirates will also deploy a larger Boeing 777-200ER on its daily ‘EK570’ and ‘EK571’ rotations, replacing the smaller A330-200 that currently serves the route. The upgauge in capacity will bring a First Class offering on the route, which in fact will be the only First Class offering into the Kolkata market.

Emirates first launched flights between Dubai and Kolkata in March 2006 as its seventh destination in India with a split schedule offering greater connectivity via its hub. A daily operation with this split schedule was introduced from early 2008, while a dedicated daily flight on the ‘EK570’ and ‘EK571’ departures came online from December 2009.

In its almost nine years of operation Emirates has flown over 1.6 million people and 55,260 tonnes of cargo on the popular route and expects the deployment of the larger aircraft, additional weekly rotation and new First Class offering will help to further stimulate the market.

“The additional flight and increased capacity also means strengthening of travel options available not just to Kolkata, but the entire east and north-east India region. We hope this capacity addition will help connect even more people to the market, and facilitate greater trade to the region and its economy," said Ahmed Khoory, senior vice president, commercial operations – West Asia and Indian Ocean, Emirates Airline.

The inbound service offers convenient connections with several regions within Emirates’ network, including many of the 37 European, 17 Middle Eastern and 20 African cities Emirates serves. With this additional service, Emirates will operate 186 weekly flights across its network of 10 Indian destinations.

In our analysis, below, we look at segment demand on Emirates’ flights between Dubai and India over the past ten years. Emirates currently offers flights to ten destinations in India from its home base – Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Cochin, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kozhikode, Kolkata, Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram – with annual capacity growing from just 2,700 seats in each direction in 2005 to over 9,000 since 2009.

The data shows that Emirates has boosted traffic demand on its flights between Dubai and India by 335.2 per cent between 2004 and 2013, an average annual growth of 37.2 per cent across the period. In 2004 the hub carrier handled 1.07 million bi-directional passengers in this market but had grown this to 4.66 million in 2013. In the first eleven months of 2014 demand was up 7.0 per cent versus the same period in 2013 with the airline closing in on the five million milestone for the full year.