While the neighbouring country of the United Arab Emirates is open for business, the drawbridge to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains up; with an aviation industry still reeling from the impact of the pandemic.
Saudi Arabia’s total seat capacity outlook for 2020 was expected to be nearly 145 million seats. Major cancellations in flight schedules between February and April have already hampered this forecast.
By the end of this year, a capacity loss of 25 percent in Saudi Arabia is forecasted by Bauer Aviation Advisory. In a worst-case scenario, the impact could be as high as 35 percent, leaving Saudi’s carriers, including national carrier Saudi Arabian Airlines, dealing with an increasing level of complexity in their networks; since many governments around the world are still getting to grips with their COVID-19 strategies, related to international travel.
The Kingdom is planning to lift all travel restrictions on air, land and sea transport for citizens in January 2021.
Before the pandemic, Saudi Arabia was moving at full speed and achieving tangible results in modernisation, infrastructure development and economic growth. In alignment with Saudi’s Vision 2030 strategy, Saudi Arabia was witnessing a sharp increase in tourism; it had been working towards revamping its tourism and entertainment offerings, by promoting its stunning coastline and UNESCO heritage sites.
Summer offers a glimpse
The Vision 2030 strategy serves as a blueprint to improve the quality of life and investment in the Kingdom. With the new types of tourist activities available, the aspirations of Saudis are expanding, even during this year’s summer season, which has coincided with COVID-19. Domestic tourism has flourished, while precautionary measures were maintained to ensure the safety of tourists.
Saudi Summer, the kingdom’s largest ever domestic leisure tourism campaign from the Saudi Tourism Authority (STA), has boosted tourism spending to SR6 billion ($1.6 billion) during the first half of the initiative. Spending on recreation and cultural activities exceeded SR1 billion, an increase of 25 percent over 2019. Spending in restaurants amounted to SR3.8 billion, an increase of 38 percent over last year.
Foundations have already been laid for the arrival of international tourist and business travellers. However, the country has still remained closed to international visitors to date.
Get Moving
That said, a multilateral approach and close collaboration between all stakeholders in Saudi Arabia, and an unwavering commitment to aviation, are essential during these critical times to restore international travel as early as possible.
The Saudi government has an opportunity to align risk-based, practical measures to allow the aviation industry to restart in a coordinated manner; while reassuring travellers, particularly business passengers. The UAE quickly recognised this threat, reopening its borders to the majority of countries worldwide, including the US, when it was safe to do so. This is an important consideration to avoid losing a large share of business and leisure travel to technology and neighbouring countries (e.g. UAE) in the short- and medium-term.
Strategic creativity thrives in environments that support it. Collective action, and collaborating to overcome this crisis, will be important to withstand the pandemic effects on travel.
Safety First
Integrating COVID-19 testing into airports across the Kingdom, e.g. at check-in, could help reassure passengers at a time when health and safety are a primary concern. By focusing on medium-high risk countries or cities (with mutual acceptance of results) it could make travel more seamless for some. For passengers arriving into Saudi Arabia from high risk countries or cities, a combination of COVID-19 testing and a short quarantine, until the verification of their results, should be required.
In the past few months, we have witnessed that fear and trust are at the forefront of people’s minds when planning a trip in the near future. Therefore, regular communication of travel information from airlines and airports to the public, in close cooperation with stakeholders, is essential for boosting reassurance among travellers and staff.
Through the establishment of air bridges between Saudi Arabia and safe countries (“travel corridors”) the removal of the need for quarantine(s) when travelling (e.g. business travel) shall be on the top of the agenda of the Saudi government. By establishing the air bridge model, and extending protection beyond the air bridge to destination services, Saudi Arabia could bring back a feeling of the ‘Old Normal’ (e.g. inside the safe, green zones) and save thousands of jobs by restoring the Saudi economy.
These steps will help Saudi Arabia effectively reset its aviation industry, whilst simultaneously boosting air travel confidence, ultimately supporting the Vision 2030 strategy.
Final Thoughts
Having a large, and diverse, domestic market can be considered one of the competitive advantages for the Saudi carriers in the Middle East. The entire recovery of a country’s airline industry will have a lot to do with the size of its domestic travel market. Countries that lack large domestic travel markets are likely to recover slower from the crisis, they may also open their borders to travellers from safe countries earlier.
In the post COVID-19 era, an increase in demand for domestic travel and domestic feeder services for long-haul flights out of Riyadh and Jeddah can be expected; driven by the increasing point-to-point traffic, the fast-changing customer behaviour of health-conscious passengers and the economic advantages associated with flying efficient, twin-engine long-range, aircraft with lower cabin density.
In total, 5.6 percent of Saudi Arabia’s GDP was supported by revenues from the air transport sector and foreign tourists arriving by airplane (IATA, 2020). The increased demand in the post COVID-19 era would support approximately $82.3 billion of GDP and almost 1.2 million jobs, directly (aviation sector) and indirectly (e.g. tourism sector).
Fully supporting the aviation and tourism sectors now means a stronger recovery for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Undoubtedly, it will recover but it takes require strategic creativity and a multilateral approach that combines vision, creativity, compromise, commitment, discipline, operational acumen and leadership from the Saudi government – combined with continuous precautions.
We had a visa for multiple entry visa for Saudi Arahia valid for 2 years. Because of COVID we were unable to use this for almost 10 months. Will this time be wasted for us or will our visa be compensated or extended automatically for those lost days?
All due respect to the points made in your article but I do not believe Saudi should fast track their air travels into the Kingdom. Yes, business is important but should never take precendence over health and wellness of the people. As we have seen with other countries that have opened too soon, the numbers tend to soar after borders reopen leading to more lockdowns and more importantly more dealths. While they have banned a few countries (India among them) from entering due to rising numbers, they have not banned the US (with the highest numbers and still rising). Thus questions arise if these banned nations are political and do not conjuring images of genuine safety concerns. Also Saudi Arabia is facing a huge problem if they decide that people entering the Kingdom need only a ‘short’ quarantine period of 3 days since can take up to 14 days for the virus to manifest! This move alone tells me that they are not prepared to open air travel, let alone fast track it. Thus although I am awaiting the border reopening for a new employment visa (expected in January 2021), I’m not going in if I don’t see more accurate safety measures being taken.
The main issue for Saudi Arabia is that it all-year-long hosts pilgrims who travel from different parts of the world to visit Makkah and Madina for religious purposes.
To make sure, those pilgrims are and will remain free of Coronavirus is a massive challenge as the government now will have to monitor their movement inside the cities and allocate time to local and international pilgrims.
This is not easy and is taking lots of planning. Saudi Gov. has announced that it will open the Umrah for local pilgrims first where the allowed capacity will be 30% in the 1st phase. People will have to request for permission via Mobile App. They will be allocated limited time to complete their pilgrimage and return back to their cities.
From January 01, 2021, if the coronavirus situation remained under control then the international pilgrims will be allowed.
With the opening of Saudi borders for international pilgrims, it can be concluded that tourists will also be allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia.
Hopefully the vaccine will be available by then because spending time in quarantine is such a turn off.
Please restart Saudi flights with India
And please report on saudi visa whose visa got expired due to lockdown.
Please restart international flights.
Allow those indians who have valid saudi visa.
Please open saudi counsellate so that we can know about our visa
Please do report about the suspension of Qatar visa services and qatar flight resumption as many of us are facing terrible problems because of this delay in services and many of us are suffering from rental issues and families are separated because of this issue.
This is not just Qatar but all countries have been pretty much the same, suspended visa service during pandemic.