Skywards has made great strides forward in its first full year since the launch. Membership is currently 340,000 - above our target for the year. These members are contributing 40% of our First and Business Class revenue, so they are very much the premium, frequent travellers an airline loyalty programme should target. Skywards continues to promote innovative marketing activities and product developments to serve our members and the commercial objectives of Emirates and SriLankan. We have relaunched our website called the “next generation of websites” by a member of the press. A new online advertising campaign to generate members and drive traffic to the site saw unprecedented click-through rates of over 30% in many of our key markets and our apply-and-fly campaign for the co-branded Emirates-Citibank Credit Card doubled our card base through one campaign.

Our new Skysurfers programme focuses on our younger passengers (up to 16 year-olds) and communicates relevantly with them aided by their own interactive website where they can post details of their recent travels.

We have also sold the system developed to support Skywards to Philippine Airlines as a further revenue-generation channel. New service centres have been opened in Karachi and over 330,000 calls from members were handled at our service centres. We have added new partners including Hertz and Sixt car rentals and retail partners including Rivoli
and Magrudy’s.