Emirates has moved to deepen its presence in mainland China through a newly signed interline agreement with Zhejiang Loong Airlines, known as Loong Air, a deal that immediately opens up seamless access to 22 additional Chinese cities for the Dubai carrier’s global customer base. The move underscores both airlines’ ambitions in one of the world’s most strategically important aviation markets and reflects the rapid recovery and diversification of air travel demand across China’s vast domestic network.
A Strategic Push Into China’s Interior
The interline partnership between Emirates and Loong Air gives Emirates passengers new one-ticket connectivity beyond the major coastal gateways that have traditionally dominated international traffic. Effective immediately, travelers flying with Emirates can transfer onto Loong Air services at Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong to reach cities spread across East, Northeast, South, Central and Southwest China.
Key destinations now available on combined itineraries include Zhengzhou in central China, Changchun in the northeast, the southern resort city of Haikou, Xiangyang in Hubei province and Dazhou in Sichuan. While these are not primary international gateways, they are significant industrial, commercial or regional transport hubs with growing demand for international links, especially to the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
For Emirates, the agreement is another step in a broader strategy to expand beyond Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou into China’s so called new tier of growth cities. Having added Shenzhen and Hangzhou to its network in the past year, the airline is now leveraging Loong Air’s dense domestic footprint to reach deeper into interior provinces without deploying its own widebody aircraft on thinner routes.
Loong Air, based in Hangzhou, gains increased visibility and traffic feed from Emirates’ global network, which spans more than 130 destinations across six continents. The tie up positions the Chinese carrier as a key connector between regional Chinese cities and long haul traffic streams flowing through Dubai, while helping it optimize capacity and yields on domestic sectors that link to international demand.
How the Interline Agreement Works for Travelers
Under the new arrangement, passengers can book journeys that include both Emirates and Loong Air flights under a single fare, rather than purchasing separate tickets from each carrier. Crucially, the itinerary is issued on one ticket, which simplifies changes, refunds and fare conditions and helps minimize complexity when disruptions occur.
The agreement also covers baggage handling throughout the journey. Travelers checking in with Emirates at their origin will have luggage tagged through to their final destination in China, even if that destination is operated by Loong Air. This removes the need to re check bags or pass back through check in at the Chinese gateway, a critical improvement in convenience, particularly for long haul passengers arriving after overnight flights.
This kind of streamlined experience is especially important as Chinese travel patterns evolve toward more multi city and multi purpose itineraries. Business travelers may now schedule meetings in several provincial centers on a single trip, while leisure travelers can combine internationally known cities such as Shanghai or Beijing with lesser known but fast growing destinations like Zhengzhou or Dazhou without having to navigate separate bookings.
Multi airline, one ticket journeys also provide greater protection for passengers in the event of delays or missed connections. Because both legs are treated as part of a single itinerary, travelers typically enjoy more robust rebooking assistance and clearer responsibility lines between airlines than they would with separate, unrelated tickets.
Digital Payments and a Market Tailored Approach
Recognizing the importance of aligning with local consumer habits, Emirates is integrating popular Chinese digital payment platforms into the booking process for these interline itineraries. Customers purchasing tickets on the airline’s official website can pay using WeChat Pay and Alipay, tools that are deeply embedded in everyday transactions across the country.
This approach reflects a broader trend among international carriers seeking to remove friction for Chinese customers at the point of sale. By allowing travelers to pay in familiar ways, in local currency and within widely trusted digital ecosystems, Emirates aims to strengthen its brand resonance in a market that is increasingly dominated by mobile first commerce.
Travel agents and online travel agencies also remain central to distribution. Tickets combining Emirates and Loong Air flights are available via global distribution systems, ensuring that corporate travel managers and retail agents worldwide can access the new city pairs when constructing itineraries for clients heading into China’s interior.
For Loong Air, participation in an interline settlement environment brings potential benefits in revenue management and international distribution. Its flights will be visible in the same booking channels used by major global carriers and corporate buyers, raising its profile beyond China’s borders and potentially diversifying its revenue base as international travel flows to interior cities increase.
Emirates’ Evolving China Network Strategy
The Loong Air agreement follows a period of accelerated growth for Emirates in greater China. In the past year, the airline launched new daily services to Shenzhen, a major technology and innovation center in the Pearl River Delta, and to Hangzhou, a leading e commerce and digital industry hub. These additions brought Emirates’ mainland China gateways to five, alongside Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Emirates now operates 49 weekly flights into mainland China, using a mix of Airbus A380s, Airbus A350s and Boeing 777 aircraft, and has deployed its Premium Economy product on routes such as Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou to capture the growing mid to upper segment of Chinese outbound travelers. The capacity mix reflects robust demand from both business and high value leisure segments, particularly on trunk routes linking China to the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
The carrier has also pursued a strategy of layered partnerships in the Chinese market. Beyond the new interline deal with Loong Air, Emirates maintains existing cooperative agreements with Air China, China Southern Airlines and Sichuan Airlines. Collectively, these partnerships give Emirates access to more than 110 destinations in China beyond its own gateways, creating what amounts to a virtual domestic network feeding into its long haul operations via Dubai.
Industry analysts note that this multi partner strategy allows Emirates to hedge against regional imbalances in demand, regulatory shifts, or operational constraints while maintaining flexibility over how it deploys widebody capacity. Instead of launching its own flights into dozens of secondary Chinese cities, the carrier can rely on a mosaic of local partners whose fleets and networks are better suited to high frequency domestic operations.
Why Secondary Chinese Cities Matter for Global Aviation
The focus on 22 additional Chinese destinations underscores how quickly intra Chinese markets have matured. Many of the newly accessible cities sit at the heart of rapidly expanding industrial clusters, logistics corridors or tourist regions, where demand for global connectivity is outpacing the development of direct long haul services.
Zhengzhou, for example, is a major manufacturing and logistics hub with extensive rail and highway links, while Haikou in Hainan province is positioned as a tourist and duty free shopping destination. Changchun, in the northeast, is known for its automotive industry, and Dazhou and Xiangyang are increasingly important regional centers with growing business travel needs.
For global airlines, flying widebody aircraft directly into these markets is often not yet economically viable, due to runway constraints, bilateral agreements or insufficient year round demand. Interline and codeshare partnerships with local carriers therefore offer a practical pathway to capture traffic without the risk of operating their own metal on relatively thin routes.
The Emirates Loong Air tie up fits squarely within this broader pattern. By using Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong as connective hubs, the two airlines can tap into rising demand from companies and travelers based in provincial cities who want one stop access to Dubai and onward to major markets in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, all while maintaining high load factors on trunk services.
Implications for Passengers and Corporate Travel
For individual travelers, particularly those originating outside China, the most immediate impact of the agreement is the ability to book more complex itineraries that remain relatively straightforward to manage. A business passenger flying from Europe or the Gulf to attend meetings in several Chinese cities can now structure a multi stop trip under a single ticket, combining Emirates long haul flights with Loong Air domestic legs.
Corporate travel managers are likely to view the expanded network as a tool for improving both cost control and duty of care. Single ticket itineraries simplify expense reconciliation and can offer better transparency on fare conditions, while more reliable through checked baggage and guaranteed connections help reduce the risk of employees getting stranded mid journey.
Leisure travelers also stand to benefit. The new interline options make it more practical to combine iconic destinations such as Beijing or Shanghai with off the beaten path cities that might offer more authentic cultural experiences or access to natural landscapes that appeal to adventure and niche tourism markets.
For expatriate communities and diaspora travelers, especially those living in the Middle East and Africa, improved connectivity to interior Chinese cities means they can reach home regions with fewer flight changes and less uncertainty about baggage and schedule coordination, reinforcing Dubai’s role as a key transit gateway for long haul travel into China.
Loong Air’s Growing Role in Regional Connectivity
Founded just over a decade ago, Loong Air has steadily built a network centered on Hangzhou, one of China’s most dynamic economic regions. Operating a narrowbody fleet on high frequency domestic routes, the airline has positioned itself as a key connector across eastern and central China, serving both major metropolitan areas and emerging provincial centers.
By entering an interline agreement with Emirates, Loong Air effectively plugs its domestic grid into one of the world’s largest international networks. This may translate into higher load factors on flights that link to Emirates’ arrival and departure banks in Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, especially on routes timed to meet early morning or late night long haul waves.
At the same time, exposure to international passenger flows can encourage Loong Air to further refine its product standards, on time performance and airport processes to meet the expectations of travelers accustomed to global carriers. Over time, this may set the stage for deeper forms of cooperation, such as codeshare arrangements or joint marketing campaigns targeted at specific origin and destination pairs.
The partnership also underscores the increasingly collaborative nature of China’s aviation landscape, as regional carriers align with international airlines to capture new revenue streams without necessarily pursuing their own long haul expansion, a capital intensive endeavor in a highly competitive market.
Dubai’s Position as a Bridge Between China and the World
The agreement with Loong Air reinforces Dubai’s status as a super connector hub linking China to Africa, Europe, the Middle East and beyond. Emirates’ model is built around aggregating traffic from multiple regions and channeling it through its hub for onward distribution, and the expansion of its Chinese feed network fits this strategy.
As trade and investment ties between China and the Middle East continue to deepen, and as Chinese companies expand their presence in Africa and South Asia, demand for efficient, one stop air links is expected to grow. With expanded access to Chinese interior cities funneling into its Dubai hub, Emirates is positioning itself to capture a larger share of that traffic.
For Chinese businesses, the network offers a relatively straightforward route structure: a domestic flight on Loong Air to an Emirates gateway, a single connection in Dubai, and onward service to key commercial centers from Johannesburg and Nairobi to London, Frankfurt and New York. The resulting web of connections effectively shortens distances between emerging industrial regions in China and markets around the world.
In that context, the Emirates Loong Air interline agreement is more than a simple booking convenience. It is part of a wider reconfiguration of global air flows in which secondary and tertiary cities, particularly in large domestic markets like China, are increasingly integrated into long haul networks through carefully structured partnerships, reshaping how and where travelers move across the globe.