Emirates has just announced that starting from June 1st, the Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger plane, will grace the skies over Bali Denpasar as it becomes the first Indonesian airport to welcome A380 flights. The double-decker behemoth will be part of Emirates’ double daily Dubai-Denpasar flights, taking the place of the 777-300ER on one of those routes.
This change will see the two-class, 615-seat A380 configuration deployed on flight EK368, which departs from Dubai at 03:25 and arrives in Denpasar at 16:35 after a 9-hour, 10-minute flight. The return flight, EK369, will leave Bali at 19:40 and touch down in Dubai at 00:45 the next day, taking just 9 hours and 5 minutes.
While the A380 offers 22% more seats compared to the previous aircraft, it won’t surpass Emirates’ record daily capacity of 1,200 seats, which was seen on some occasions in 2018 and 2019. Nevertheless, the shift to the A380 will give Emirates a competitive edge over other airlines operating up to five daily flights from the Middle East to Bali this summer.
Despite the increase in capacity, it’s worth noting that the leisure-heavy Dubai-Denpasar route also employs Emirates’ highest-density 777-300ER, which has a two-class configuration with 428 seats. In total, there will be 1,043 departing seats available for sale daily on the route, a significant increase from the previous number.
Emirates first launched its Dubai-Denpasar service eight years ago, back in June 2015. Based on booking data, the airline carried approximately 390,000 passengers to Denpasar in 2019, with a seat load factor of around 81%. Most passengers, an estimated 86%, transited through Dubai to and from Bali, with the UK being the most popular country of origin, followed by the Netherlands, Germany, France, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Russia, the US, and Spain.
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