Travel tales: Airlines line up flights as Saudi woos Indian tourists

Even as the Saudi Tourism Authority has targeted getting 1.8 million people from India for tourism and leisure this calendar year, the country has become the fourth-largest contributor globally to inbound airline-capacity growth in the West Asian kingdom.
 

India has added 443,000 seats in CY2024, according to OAG, an aviation research agency.
 

Underlying the move is the growing importance of India in the kingdom’s ambition to bring in 330 million passengers and connect 250 destinations. It expects 7.5 million Indian tourists and leisure travellers to hit the kingdom by the end of the decade. According to OAG, in 2024 there will be a capacity of 2.6 million seats from India to Saudi Arabia, a growth rate of more than 13 per cent over the previous calendar year.
 

With Egypt at 6.6 million seats and the United Arab Emirates at 6.2 million, India is at third spot in the pecking order.

With the tourism season starting in October, the tourism authority is on a B2C (business to consumer) marketing campaign, which, a top executive said, is the largest made by any tourism authority in India.
 

The authority is selling two key destinations to Indian tourists. One is super-luxury “Red Sea Global”, owned by the sovereign Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is one and a half hours away from Jeddah and Riyadh, and boasts five super luxury resorts (of the 50 being built) ready for service. The other region is the “Golden Triangle”, which includes Jeddah, Riyadh, and Al Ula, the country’s first Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) site in the country. 
 

Anil Kalsi, vice-president of the Travel Agents Federation of India, said: “There is a shift in what Saudi Arabia is focusing on. It’s not about a labour movement from India, especially as they (the tourists) are undertaking mega projects or visiting religious places which have been there for long. The new focus is on wooing leisure tourists to come to the country and even a programme for single women. While they are marketing it aggressively, more flights are now available inbound from India than ever before.”
 

Airlines are announcing flights and expansion. Last month Akasa joined the party by starting daily direct flights from Mumbai, going up to 12 flights a week. It is flying two weekly flights from Ahmedabad.
 

IndiGo has announced additional non-stop flights from Mumbai to Jeddah from August 15. As a result of this, it will have 42 weekly flights, from five cities, to Jeddah. It also flies directly to Riyadh. Air India Express in April started a direct flight between Mangalore and Jeddah. Executives in Saudi Airlines say India is among their top five markets in the world with over 100 weekly flights through six cities in the country. 
 

Unlike other countries where international capacity from India peaked in 2019 and took a long while after the pandemic to touch similar levels once again, mostly in 2023, the story is different in Saudi Arabia. The inbound passenger movement from India to Saudi Arabia, according to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, has shot up 70 per cent from the March quarter of 2019 to hit 658,701 in January-March 2024.