Tim Clark: I dreamed of Emirates hotels and cruise ships

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Sir Tim Clark says his vision for Emirates Airline has long extended beyond aviation, with ambitions to launch branded hotels and even Emirates cruise ships.

The long-time president of the state-backed Emirates Group told AGBI he had envisaged a global hospitality empire alongside the carrier, linking destinations and moving passengers from plane, to port, to property.

While the idea has not been realised during his 23-year tenure, Clark said it is a strategy he believes should be taken up by the airline’s future leadership.

“If I had my way, I would have an Emirates hotel in every city in the world,” Clark said in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the World Governments Summit on Wednesday.

The concept would have placed the carrier at the centre of a premium travel network, he said. The hotels would have been pitched at the very top end of the market, comparable to Ritz-Carlton, with service standards designed to match the airline’s first class cabins.

Emirates aircraft would funnel passengers directly into the group’s hotels and cruises, creating what he described as a “symbiotic relationship” across the journey. “I really saw that to be a niche that wasn’t being really serviced as well as it could be,” Clark said.

The idea never progressed beyond the drawing board. 

“I think my chairman [Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum] was more concerned about getting the job done with regard to the airline, rather than people like me going off course and looking at other things, which I wouldn’t have done,” Clark said.

“I would have set up a hotel group and had people obviously running it. I know as much about running a hotel as I do coal mining.”

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Clark has gone on to shape one of the world’s largest and most profitable long-haul carriers, but he remains convinced the hospitality logic holds. 

“I’m a bit past it now,” he said. “I still think there’s a case for whoever comes after me.”

Emirates Group has owned the high-end Al Maha desert resort near Dubai since the late 1990s.

And in January it signed a deal with Marriott International to open Emirates Wolgan Valley, a Ritz-Carlton property that is a 40-key all-inclusive luxury lodge on a 7,000-acre conservancy in Australia’s Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage area.

“I think when it gets up and running it’ll be one of the best hotels in the southern hemisphere,” Clark said.