Dubai International Airport on Wednesday reopened its Concourse A at Terminal 3. With this development, the capacity of the airport has increased to almost 100 percent after 20 months of limited operations in view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Arriving from the Maldives, Flight EK659 was the first to land on Concourse A since the area was closed on March 25, 2020, in line with the safety precautions taken by the UAE authorities to limit the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Dubai airport is a prominent institution in the emirate, providing employment to a large number of people and serving as a major gateway for tourists arriving in the country.

Concourse A was the world's first purpose-built A380 terminal, serving the Emirates Airline which has an annual capacity of 19 million passengers.

According to reports, the concourse will witness a phased reopening over the coming weeks. It will allow the airport to maintain high standards of service while accommodating the heavy influx of seasonal travellers in December.

Amid the ongoing recovery efforts, Emirates Airline has also restored 90 percent of its network. The airline is on track to achieve 70 percent of its pre-COVID-19 capacity by the end of 2021. In October, it announced plans to hire 6,000 workers within six months to meet the demands of the sector after recovery.

This week, Dubai Duty Free also announced its plans to rehire nearly 1,400 workers who were laid off due to the impact of the pandemic. During the pandemic, the company laid off a total of 2,508 people and 800 people resigned in several tranches.

Ramesh Cidambi, the chief operating officer of Dubai Duty Free, termed the first half of the year 2020 "catastrophic" for the business.

Speaking with the Dubai Eye Radio station, he said the company was closed in April and May 2020 taking the sales to zero. While the business reopened in June, sales were only about five percent of what it would have made normally.

"Sales started to pick up gradually during the course of last year. We finished the year with just under $3 billion and sales normally would have done about $7.4bn. This year now we are on target to do about $3.5bn in sales in comparison to $7.4bn in 2019," he added.

The reopening of concourse D at Dubai International Airport in August also facilitated the rehiring of about 600 people. The airport conducted another round of recruitment to hire 1,000 people in October.

In addition, out of the 2,508 people that were laid off about 1,600 have been asked to come back for work.

Meanwhile, Mr Cidambi has stated that the spending habits of travellers have also changed since the onset of the pandemic.

"People are spending $10 to $15 more per person, but more importantly, more of the passengers are spending money in shops, and that is a trend that we have seen consistently from June of last year. That's the reason that we are able to stay 10 to 15 percentage points higher than the passenger numbers," he said.

Last week, Dubai's airport operator predicted an additional two million surge in its forecast for annual passenger traffic this year.

"We're projecting 57 million for next year at the moment and 28.7 million for this year," Paul Griffiths, the chief executive of Dubai Airports, said in talks with The National.