Emirates adds fifth daily Cairo flight to meet rising Egypt demand

Fifth daily service begins February, expanding links between UAE and Egypt

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Dubai: Emirates will add more flights to Cairo from December, strengthening its presence in Egypt and marking one of its most significant capacity increases in North Africa. The airline will introduce six additional weekly services from December 1, 2025, before transitioning to a full fifth daily frequency from February 2026.

The move reflects rising leisure and corporate travel demand between the UAE and Egypt and growing traffic flows to Asia through Dubai. The additional services are timed to support long-haul connectivity to markets such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

The December frequencies will run six days a week during the winter peak, operated by a Boeing 777. From February, the service becomes daily with revised timings to complement the existing four-flight schedule.

Cairo was one of Emirates’ earliest international routes and remains one of its most strategically important. The Egyptian capital already sees the highest deployment of A380 aircraft in the region outside Dubai. Once the fifth daily service is live, Cairo will become the most served city in the airline’s African network.

The Middle East’s largest airline has carried more than 10 million passengers to and from Egypt since it launched flights in 1986. Over time, the route has evolved from a regional connection into a hub-to-hub corridor linking Egypt to Asia, Europe and Australia.

The additional frequency will also add more cargo capacity, with about 300 tonnes of weekly belly-hold space on the Boeing 777 aircraft. Emirates SkyCargo plays a key role in supporting Egypt’s agriculture exporters, including shipments of fresh produce such as strawberries and other fruit and vegetables.

The UAE and Egypt maintain strong economic ties, supported by joint tourism, industrial and commercial developments. Increased air connectivity is expected to further support cross-border investment and trade, particularly in fast-growing sectors such as manufacturing, logistics and hospitality.

Nivetha Dayanand is Assistant Business Editor at Gulf News, covering aviation, financial markets and commodities. A business and financial journalist with a strong interest in multimedia storytelling, she regularly takes complex financial and economic subjects beyond the written word, producing explainer videos that make them easier for a wider audience to understand. Nivetha has interviewed senior policymakers, business leaders and global financial figures both on and off camera. Her past guests include UAE Minister of Economy and Tourism Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri, Khaled bin Alwaleed Al Saud, a member of the House of Saud and the founder and CEO of KBW Ventures, Jihad Azour, Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department at the International Monetary Fund and Indian ministers Hardeep Singh Puri and N. Chandrababu Naidu. She has also hosted and moderated panels, conferences and awards shows, bringing her newsroom experience to live conversations on business, finance and the economy. An Erasmus Mundus journalism alum, Nivetha is drawn to stories that affect people directly and to reporting that gives a platform to voices that might otherwise go unheard. She was among the first journalists to speak to Petrofac employees in the UAE about unpaid salaries, broke the news of the planned demolition of Dubai’s well-known “Toyota Building”, and helped set the record straight on widely circulated claims that a giant replica of the Moon was coming to Dubai. More recently, her exclusive interview with EDGE Group CEO Hamad Al Marar revealed how the UAE-based defence group deployed its systems along the country’s shore border and established a geofence around the UAE within 48 hours of the February 28 escalation. Prior to joining Gulf News, Nivetha worked at ITP Media, where she helped launch Finance Middle East, a new publication covering the region’s financial sector. Her role spanned reporting and editing, video production, interviews and events. Across print, digital, and video, she focuses on finding the people behind business stories and explaining why those stories matter to the audience reading or watching them.

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