Layla Al-Hashemi
Nine years on the Emirates Marhaba ground hospitality team at DXB. Multilingual. Writes part-time on Gulf hubs and lounge networks.
Layla spent nine years on the Emirates Marhaba ground hospitality team at DXB, mostly at Concourse B, mostly working the morning long-haul wave. She left in 2024 to write and to consult quietly for a couple of regional hospitality groups, both of which she’d prefer not to name in public.
She writes for airport.flights as a paid freelance contributor, two pieces a month focused on Gulf-region lounges, the hospitality-versus-marketing distinction in lounge experience, and the broader question of how a hub airport’s reputation gets built on a thousand small service decisions that don’t make press releases. Her beat is the ground-hospitality view of DXB and its regional peers.
She lives in Dubai Marina, flies DXB by default, and tells her colleagues that the Plaza Premium at DXB is the under-discussed lounge of the network — not in the same league as the Emirates First product, but consistently better than its third-party peer set at the same airport.