Emirates has returned over 1.4 billion dollars of unused tickets occasioned by the ban in air travel across many countries during the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020.
While that amount represents 90 per cent of the airline’s backlog, it said in a statement on its Twitter page @emirates that it was working on completing pending refunds to its customers.
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These include all requests received from customers around the world up until the end of June, save for a few cases which require further manual review.
Since the pandemic hit, Emirates has invested additional resources to ramp up its processing capability.
Daily Trust reports that the airline, this week, resumed passenger services to Nigeria after over five months due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Passenger services to Lagos started again on 7 September and daily flights to Abuja from 9 September.
The resumption of flights to both Nigerian cities takes Emirates’ African network to 13 destinations.
President of Emirates Airline, Sir Tim Clark, said: “We are committed to honouring refunds and are trying our utmost to clear the massive and unprecedented backlog that was caused by the pandemic.
“Most cases are straightforward, and these we will process quickly.”
