Dubai International Airport wins Air Transport World Award for outstanding advertisement

This award was presented to Anita Mehra Homayoun, Director, Marketing and Corporate Communications at the 32nd Annual Awards Gala Dinner held in Singapore on February 20, 2006.

Air Transport World Magazine is the leading monthly magazine serving the needs of the global airline and commercial air transport manufacturing communities. Each month, close to 40,000 subscribers around the world look forward to reading up on the latest trends and developments affecting their businesses.

The ATW airline industry awards program was born in 1974 to recognize excellence. Originally a modest program, the ATW Awards over the intervening decades have gained in importance and stature to become one of the most coveted and valued honors a company or a person in the airline industry can receive.

The judging for the Awards was done by the industry specialist and Ads were judged based on their ability to get the message across about how the company would offer solutions and make life easier for the customer which in the case of DIA are the airlines. The Ad that has won the Award shows numerous parrots against a beautiful sunset background all whispering to each other about DIA. The comments from the judges stating their reasons for giving DIA the award were: 'It looks like everyone is talking about Dubai and they are parrots! We thought that the parrots drew us into the ad combined with the interesting colour scheme. It drew us to the copy where we learned about the enormous growth going on at Dubai Airport. We also like the way Dubai Airport subtly infused their customer airlines throughout the ad. We thought this ad was very nice. '

The judging was held in October 2005 in Washington, DC. Gold and Silver awards were picked from each of 16 individual categories of full-page advertisers from the preceding year. In addition, an Ad of the Year and Campaign of the year were also chosen.

Dubai International Airport is undergoing a major US$ 4.1 bn expansion programme includes the construction of Terminal 3, concourse 2 and concourse 3, all of which will be exclusive to Emirates airlines, a Mega Cargo Terminal and a major upgrade of Terminal 2. The entire project is slated to be completed by 2007. With the completion of the 2nd phase Dubai International Airport will have the capacity to handle 70 million passengers a year.

In the year 2005, the number of airlines operation DIA increased to 110 from 104 in 2004 and 24.7 million passengers passed through Dubai while over 28 million are expected this year. According to forecasts, 60 million passengers are expected by the year 2010.