# Hello Tomorrow to Fly Better: The Story Behind Emirates' Changing Promise

Source: https://kredit.ae/blog/emirates-hello-tomorrow-fly-better-brand-story

Emirates ran through four brand promises in four decades, from Hello Tomorrow to Fly Better. The full, sourced story of what backs the newer one up.

Category: General  
Published: 2026-08-18T13:47:47.905Z  
Author: Kredit

## 1985: Two borrowed jets and $10 million

Emirates didn't start as a global airline with a brand strategy — it started as a five-month deadline. In March 1985, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, then Dubai's Defence Minister, asked Sir Maurice Flanagan, managing director of Dubai ground-handling agent dnata, to look into starting an airline from scratch. The brief was blunt: "look good, be good, and make money" — with no subsidies and no protected routes, in line with Dubai's open-skies policy. Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum became chairman in 1985 and still holds that role today.

Emirates had no aircraft of its own to start with. Its first flights, on 25 October 1985, were operated with a wet-leased Boeing 737 and Airbus A310 repainted in Emirates colours, flying to Karachi and Mumbai with help from Pakistan International Airlines, which supplied crew and training. Seed capital was $10 million from the Dubai government. Emirates didn't take delivery of its first owned aircraft — an Airbus A310 — until July 1987.

## Before Hello Tomorrow: two other promises, and a lot of growth

The brand history most people know starts in 2012, but Hello Tomorrow wasn't Emirates' first slogan, or even its second. In the 1990s the airline ran under "So be good to yourself, Fly Emirates." In 2004, that gave way to "Fly Emirates. Keep Discovering." — a more travel-forward pitch that held for close to a decade. Counting Hello Tomorrow and Fly Better, that's at least four distinct brand promises across four decades.

Each new promise arrived alongside real growth. Emirates took delivery of its first Airbus A380 in 2008 and became the world's largest A380 operator by a wide margin — its final A380 arrived in December 2021, from an order running well past 100 aircraft. Today's fleet runs to roughly 260-270 aircraft flying to more than 130 destinations. Emirates has never explained its slogan changes in these terms, but the practical shift is hard to ignore: a young airline can credibly sell the idea of connecting the world to itself. An airline flying to 130-plus destinations is making a claim about the entire industry — a harder thing to say with a straight face than it used to be.

## 2012: Hello Tomorrow

Hello Tomorrow launched in 2012 as a global brand platform across more than 80 markets, created by agency StrawberryFrog with print executed through Impact BBDO Dubai. The concept centred on what the campaign called "globalistas" — people who live for new cultures, food, fashion, art and music — and pitched Emirates as the bridge connecting them to the rest of the world. Launch placements included billboards in Times Square and Milan's Central Station, alongside TV, print and digital executions.

The campaign's most recognisable face arrived later, in 2015, when Emirates signed Jennifer Aniston for a reported $20 million global campaign, with her personal deal said to be worth around $5 million (Emirates never confirmed the exact figure). The timing wasn't a coincidence: rival Etihad had signed Nicole Kidman as its own brand ambassador the year before, and Emirates answered by out-spending and out-casting its rival. Aniston's ads ran three years into the Hello Tomorrow platform, not at its 2012 launch — most people now associate her with the whole campaign anyway.

## 2018: Fly Better

Emirates retired Hello Tomorrow on 1 November 2018 for "Fly Better" — a narrower promise. Instead of selling the idea of connection, the new platform pointed at the product itself: the aircraft, the cabin, the flight. The launch included a film by Michael Gracey, director of *The Greatest Showman*, built around a cabin-crew member morphing into a dancer to showcase Emirates' 1,000-plus-title ICE inflight entertainment system, plus a second, destinations-led film. Its first major placement was UK primetime television, during an episode of *The X Factor*.

Emirates President Sir Tim Clark framed the shift as continuity rather than change: flying Emirates, in his telling, means a better flying experience regardless of how much bigger the airline had become, pointing to seatback screens, enclosed First Class suites and A380 shower spas as proof already sitting on the aircraft. That's still just an assertion until you can check it against something — which is exactly what the rest of this article tries to do.

## Backing the promise with money

Emirates has spent the years since Fly Better launched putting real money behind that assertion rather than running another ad campaign. Its cabin retrofit programme — reworking existing aircraft interiors instead of waiting for new deliveries — was first announced in November 2021 covering 105 aircraft; work began in November 2022; the scope expanded to 191 aircraft in 2024, then to 219 aircraft later that year, "reflecting strong customer demand," per Emirates' own releases. It's now a $5 billion investment across those 219 aircraft, and it passed a real milestone this year: 100 aircraft fully reworked (47 A380s and 53 Boeing 777s), more than 400 engineers deployed, roughly 4.4 million man-hours of cabin work, and more than 3,800 new Premium Economy seats installed so far.

On the product side, Emirates' U-Dream headrest — a multi-way adjustable headrest for Economy Class — launched first on three A350 aircraft, with a fleet-wide rollout across all A350s targeted by the end of the year. It also comes pre-installed on the 270 Boeing 777X aircraft Emirates has on order, though retrofit installations on the A380 and 777 aren't scheduled to begin until 2027. Fly Better, in other words, is still a promise being rolled out fleet by fleet, not something every passenger experiences today.

The same instinct shows up at a smaller scale. Emirates' cabin crew uniform — beige, with a signature scarf carrying seven pleats, one for each emirate — is no small production run: the airline has reported 1.627 million metres of fabric, 153,000 km of thread and more than 1.8 million buttons across uniforms for its 20,000-plus cabin crew, each of whom completes eight weeks of training in Dubai before their first flight. Emirates backs even small details with a production number, not just a line of copy.

## Even the logo changed

The tail of the aircraft tells the same story in miniature. The original 1985 livery, designed by UK firm Negus & Negus, carried a stylised UAE flag on the tailfin with a gold English-and-Arabic wordmark. A 1999 refresh enlarged and repositioned the English logotype and revised the flowing tailfin flag. In March 2023, Emirates unveiled its first significant redesign in roughly 24 years: a 3D-effect flowing UAE flag on the tailfin and red wingtips carrying white, reversed Arabic calligraphy. For an airline whose product is a physical aircraft seen from the ground for a few seconds at a time, three redesigns in four decades reads as a deliberate, unhurried pace rather than neglect.

## On and off the pitch

Not all of Emirates' brand spend is about the aircraft itself, and it's worth being clear about the difference: sponsorship is marketing spend, not cabin spend, and it doesn't prove a single seat is more comfortable. What it does show is how much Emirates is willing to risk on being seen as a premium brand — and when it's willing to walk away.

The clearest example: Emirates was the first major sponsor to publicly cut ties with FIFA, in November 2014, at the height of the corruption allegations surrounding the Qatar 2022 and Russia 2018 World Cup bids. Emirates officially cited contract terms, not the scandal, as the reason — but the timing did the talking. On the spending side, Emirates signed Arsenal to a stadium-naming-plus-shirt deal in October 2004 (Emirates Stadium from 2006, shirt sponsorship from 2006-07, an original package reported at £90-100 million, renewed and expanded since), and has been Real Madrid's primary shirt sponsor since 2013-14 — a 2026 renewal through the 2030-31 season reportedly the largest shirt-sponsorship deal in world football. Whatever else changed between Hello Tomorrow and Fly Better, the willingness to spend heavily on visibility, and to drop a partner when the risk outweighed it, has stayed constant.

## Does the promise hold up?

Emirates has won Skytrax's "World's Best Airline" title four times — 2001 (the inaugural year), 2002, 2013 and 2016 — but not again: Qatar Airways and Singapore Airlines have topped every edition since, with Emirates placing third in 2024. Brand Finance's 2026 Airlines 50 report ranks Emirates third most valuable airline brand globally at $10.6 billion, up 27% year-on-year, behind Delta and United.

None of that measures whether one specific retrofitted seat is actually better than the one it replaced — that's a narrower question only your own flight can answer, and third-party brand rankings aren't a substitute for it. What the numbers do show is that Emirates isn't currently the industry's top-ranked airline on either measure, and this article isn't pretending otherwise. A brand promise you can only prove by citing your own press releases isn't much of a promise; one that still admits when it's been outranked is at least being honest about what it hasn't proven yet.

## What this means if you fly Emirates today

Back in 2018, "Fly Better" invited an obvious question: better than what, exactly? The honest answer today is: better than the same aircraft's own interior a few years ago, on the 100 jets that have already been through the retrofit programme — and not yet meaningfully different on the roughly 119 still waiting their turn, or on any Economy seat outside the three A350s currently carrying the U-Dream headrest. That's a narrower answer than "yes, obviously," but it's the one the actual retrofit numbers, sponsorship spend and award history support — which is a more honest place to land than the brand platform it replaced ever tried to reach.

## Frequently asked questions

### When did Emirates launch "Fly Better"?

On 1 November 2018, replacing the airline's previous "Hello Tomorrow" brand platform from 2012.

### What was "Hello Tomorrow"?

Emirates' 2012 brand platform, built around the idea of the airline (and Dubai) as a bridge connecting "globalistas" to new cultures, food, fashion, art and music, across more than 80 markets.

### Was Jennifer Aniston part of the original 2012 Hello Tomorrow launch?

No. Her campaign ran in 2015, three years after Hello Tomorrow launched, as a later chapter of the same brand era rather than its original face.

### How much is Emirates spending on its cabin retrofit programme?

$5 billion across 219 aircraft in total; 100 (47 A380s and 53 Boeing 777s) have been fully reworked so far, representing roughly 4.4 million man-hours of work.

### Has Emirates always been ranked the world's best airline?

No. It won Skytrax's World's Best Airline award in 2001, 2002, 2013 and 2016, but has ranked behind Qatar Airways and Singapore Airlines every year since, placing third in 2024.

### Is "Fly Better" just a slogan, or does it reflect real change?

It's backed by real spend: a $5 billion, 219-aircraft cabin retrofit programme (100 done so far) and new products like the U-Dream headrest — but the rollout is still partial, so the honest answer is "better on the aircraft that have been redone," not "better everywhere yet."