When remote work took off, a lot of people expected regional headquarters to loosen their ties to airports. If a leadership team can run a dozen markets over video, the thinking went, the office could sit anywhere with decent broadband and a sensible tax rate. A study published in Nature Cities tested that assumption against 30 years of data, covering millions of firms in around 800 cities and more than 400,000 international routes. It found that multinationals kept choosing cities they could reach by direct flight, with the strongest effect in knowledge-heavy industries, and that the pattern held through the spread of video conferencing and through Covid.
It was a reasonable assumption, and the data shows where it went wrong. What a headquarters needs from a city has very little to do with how well that city handles a video call.
Trust is built over coffee, not video calls
Much of a regional head’s work is relationship driven. Regulators, distributors, government clients and the occasional partner all call for a human presence. Contracts can be signed over video, but trust tends to be built across a table, and getting to the table takes a flight. The Nature Cities researchers describe air links as a way of building trust and narrowing the information gap between firms.
There is also a simple matter of time. A regional head covering ten markets has a fixed number of working days in a year, and each hour in a transit lounge is an hour not spent with a customer. A base with direct flights to most of the region and a base that needs a connection for half of it can look identical in a business case, but the difference adds up quickly over twelve months. Companies tend to find this out in their first year, when the calendar shows what the spreadsheet left out.
A regional head is also something of a fire brigade. When a government client has a problem or a partner wavers, the person who can be in the room the next day usually keeps the relationship, and the person who needs three days to arrive usually ends up managing it from a distance. A city that makes next-day presence routine gives its headquarters a service that appears on no brochure.
London, Singapore and Dubai are on the same path
The cities that do best at attracting regional headquarters tend to be the ones airlines have built their networks around, and they sit on three continents.
London is the most established example. Heathrow was named the world’s most connected airport for the third year running in OAG’s 2025 Megahubs ranking, offering 226 destinations and more than 59,000 possible connections on its busiest day. Singapore is the Asian version. Its Economic Development Board reports that 46% of the top 100 multinationals chose the city for their regional headquarters, and it names Changi Airport among the reasons. Pandora opened its own regional headquarters there in November 2025.
The three cities do different jobs. Heathrow is Europe’s main gateway, with a deep reach across the Atlantic and into Asia. Changi is the entry point to Southeast Asia’s fast-growing markets. Dubai sits between Europe, Africa and Asia and handles a large share of the traffic that connects between them. What they share is what the research describes: an airport that puts a senior executive in the room, in most of the markets a company cares about, within a day. Dubai belongs in that company, and its numbers show why.
Connectivity is a network, and Dubai sits at the centre of a large one
Connectivity here means more than a long list of destinations. The same research points to links with key airports, so a city’s place in the wider network counts for more than its raw route count. Dubai’s main airport handled 95.2 million passengers in 2025, the highest annual international traffic any airport has recorded, and it connected to 291 destinations in 110 countries.
The more telling figure is how well those routes work together. In the Airports Council International connectivity index for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, Dubai International ranked first for hub connectivity, with a score nearly 40% ahead of the next airport. It is also one of the world’s main connecting points. Dubai Airports reports that 22.4 million passenger journeys a year pass through DXB as international transfers, about a third of the transfer traffic across the region’s hubs. A hub that busy gives airlines a reason to keep adding services and timing them for onward travel, which for a regional head means landing, meeting, and flying out, with no night spent in between.
Connectivity feeds itself
Airlines add routes where business travellers are, and business travellers gather where the routes are. A city that gets ahead in that loop tends to stay ahead, because each new headquarters gives the next airline another reason to add a service, and each new service gives the next headquarters another reason to move in. A relationship that persists across three decades of data is consistent with that kind of loop.
Recent arrivals in Dubai fit the pattern. PayPal opened its first Middle East and Africa regional headquarters in the emirate in April 2025, with a remit covering more than 80 markets, and Veon moved its global headquarters to the city the same year. A remit that wide only works from a base that reaches most of those markets without fuss, and each company of that kind adds to the traffic that keeps the routes viable. Payments, technology and telecoms are also the kind of knowledge-heavy businesses where the research found the link to flights strongest.
Airports do not do it alone
Airports aren’t the only hero here. Tax treatment, legal frameworks, office space, schools and housing are what put a city on a shortlist in the first place. Connectivity does a different job. It keeps the regional head based there once the novelty of the move has worn off and the travel calendar has set in, which is when a headquarters decision is really tested.
Riyadh has taken a different route to the same prize
Saudi Arabia now requires multinationals that want government contracts to maintain a regional headquarters in the Kingdom, a rule widely read as an effort to compete with Dubai. It comes with incentives, including the ability to apply for unlimited work visas and a 10-year waiver on hiring quotas for Saudi nationals. Policy of that kind can produce a licence quickly.
Where senior people live and work is harder to direct. A Baker Institute fellow quoted when the rule was introduced described it as an early test of whether foreign companies would move real operations or find workarounds that kept most staff in the UAE and sent a few people to Saudi Arabia. A region with two strong business centres is good for the companies that serve it, and the better connected each one becomes, the stronger its case. The cities that keep winning will be the ones executives pick when no rule obliges them to.
A ten-year lease is a bet on the next airport
Headquarters decisions run for a decade or more, which makes them partly a bet on airports that do not exist yet. Dubai International is operating close to its physical limits, and the city’s answer is Al Maktoum International, planned with five runways and capacity for up to 260 million passengers a year. Its second runway is due to open next year, and flydubai is among the first carriers expected to move part of its operations there. Singapore is placing the same kind of bet, with Changi’s Terminal 5 projected to lift capacity to as much as 140 million passengers a year when it opens in the mid-2030s.
For a company about to sign a lease on a regional office, that reads as a city with a plan for the traffic it expects to carry and the first pieces already being built. Companies comparing hubs are in effect comparing airport plans as well as office rents, and a hub that has started its expansion gives a headquarters something firm to plan around.
The next wave will be smaller and more mobile
The next wave of regional headquarters is likely to be smaller than the last, built around compact senior teams that spend a large share of the year in other people’s offices. For a team of twelve who need to be in Nairobi on Tuesday and Mumbai on Thursday, a good runway counts for more than a large floor plate. Office space can be built within a couple of years. A network of routes takes decades of airlines deciding, one at a time, that a city is worth flying to, and that is hard for any newcomer to speed up, which helps explain why the same cities keep making the shortlist.
