Emirates Airline has swallowed its pride and is making moves to resume its daily flight operations to Nigeria on October 1, 2024. It has announced the resumption of its daily operations in Nigeria. The airline announced this on Thursday via a post on the airlines’ official X handle. The post reads “We’re back, Nigeria! We’ll be resuming services to Lagos from 1 October 2024, and we can’t wait to offer unrivalled connectivity to Dubai and beyond to over 140 cities.” The airline suspended its flights to Nigeria in October 2022. This decision follows a meeting with Salem Saeed Al-Shamsi,the United Arab Emirates Ambassador to Nigeria, held at the UAE and Embassy in Abuja.
Keyamo had said on his X account on Wednesday, May 15, that Emirates Airlines has set a specific date for its return to Nigeria and assured that the airline will make an official announcement within the next few days. He wrote, “Yesterday, I paid a working visit to the Ambassador of the UAE to Nigeria, His Excellency, Salem Saeed Al-Shamsia at the UAE Embassy in Abuja. “He handed me a correspondence from the Emirates Airline indicating a definite date of their resumption of flights to Nigeria. That date will be formally announced by Emirates Airlines in a matter of days.” Flights have resumed after the issue concerning the repatriation of Emirates’ earnings in US dollars, which caused the airline to suspend operations in Nigeria in October 2023, was resolved. Confirming Keyamo’s position, the airline, in an official statement on its website, said it will resume services to Nigeria from October 1 2024, operating a daily service between Lagos and Dubai and offering customers more choice and connectivity from Nigeria’s largest city to and through Dubai.
Adnan Kazim, Emirates’ Deputy President and Chief Commercial Officer, said, “We are excited to resume our services to Nigeria. The Lagos-Dubai service has traditionally been popular with customers in Nigeria and we hope to reconnect leisure and business travellers to Dubai and onwards to our network of over 140 destinations. We thank the Nigerian government for their partnership and support in re-establishing this route, and we look forward to welcoming passengers back onboard.” With the resumption of operations to Nigeria, Emirates operates to 19 gateways in Africa with 157 flights per week from Dubai, with further reach to an additional 130 regional points in Africa through its codeshare and interline partnerships with South African Airways, Airlink, Royal Air Maroc, Tunis Air, among others.
