Saudi Air Connectivity Program (ACP), CEO, Majid Khan at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Asia 2024

Transcript

Majid Khan:Saudi Arabia, in terms of air connectivity, we are highly, highly underserved market. To give you a bit of a background, I mean, if you look on the top 10 largest routes around the world, that's 2 of them are out of Saudi. So Cairo-Jeddah with 6 million seats and Dubai-Riyadh with 4 million seats. Which actually confirms that majority of the passengers who need to arrive to Saudi, they need to use competitor hubs. So, and that's where Saudi Air Connectivity comes in. We have some ambitious targets to attract 150 million tourists by 2030, but we need to make sure we have enough seats from the key source markets so the travelers can fly directly into Saudi Arabia. This year only, we have attracted 12 new airlines. All foreign carriers. And the reason— it doesn't mean we are not focusing on our own carriers, they're very important as well. But when we bring the foreign carriers, they have a strong presence, their sales and marketing channels at their home, at their home market, which means the percentage of inbound tourism will be higher than outbound tourism. So to highlight a few, Virgin will going to start from summer '25 directly from Heathrow. I mean, this week, British Airways They commenced new flights from Heathrow to Jeddah 6 times a week. Eurowings from Berlin and Cologne to Jeddah, Transavia as well. And if we look from Asia, China Southern, China Eastern, Air China, Cathay, all 4 are in Saudi, but at the moment in Riyadh. But we will definitely look on expanding their capacity into Riyadh, but furthermore also to Jeddah and Dammam as well. These are our— I mean, the way we have split Saudi Arabia, we have 29 airports, but Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, and Madinah are the 4 main hubs. And then we try to drive traffic via these 4 into the secondary destinations mainly. As I mentioned, 150 million tourists, but the key number is actually the international tourists. So last year, out of 100 million, we had 27 million international inbound. And this is the number we would need to cross to 60+ by 2030. So what we need at the program to make sure that we are connected with high frequencies from the key source markets by 2030, and that is Europe, Asia. In Asia, it's China, Korea, Japan, and the South Asian hubs. Only in China, we need to attract 5 million Chinese tourists by 2030. So very, very, very, very ambitious targets. And of course, North America. I mean, we are highly underserved. I mean, we have limited frequencies to Toronto, JFK, LA, and that's it. And to share one example, Riyadh-Jakarta, it's capital to capital, 2 very large markets. We have 150,000 passengers at the moment who fly indirectly, and that definitely justifies a direct route. we are not connected. So our ambition will be to keep the momentum we have now, and that's bringing at least 10 airlines per year. But we need to develop these airlines as well. It's not enough to bring them. And at least 20 to 25 new routes per year so we can fulfill the tourism strategy and aviation strategy targets by 2030. Thank you.

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