Saudi Arabia’s ambitious new airline Riyadh Air considers India a “super important” market and will explore potential partnerships with Indian carriers IndiGo and Air India in addition to its plans of operating flights between the two countries as passenger flows between India and Saudi Arabia are growing rapidly, Riyadh Air’s Chief Executive Officer Tony Douglas said Wednesday. Saudi Arabia expects India to become its largest source market for tourism by 2030, and Indian nationals are already the biggest non-Saudi resident group in that country, making India a lucrative market for Riyadh Air.
Douglas is in New Delhi as part of a Riyadh Air delegation for meetings with India’s aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to discuss the requisite permissions and support for launch of the airline’s India operations. Douglas is also slated to meet top executives of IndiGo and Air India to discuss possible partnerships.
The Riyadh-based full-service airline, which is Saudi Arabia’s second national carrier alongside Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia) and is slated to start commercial operations later this year, has already forged partnerships with various global airlines including Delta Air Lines, Singapore Airlines, Turkish Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, China Eastern, Air China, and Egypt Air.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is the force behind Riyadh Air, which aims to fly to over 100 destinations by 2030. The airline has 39 wide-body Boeing 787 aircraft on order, with an option to expand the order size to 72 jets, in addition to 60 Airbus A321 narrow-body planes.
According to Douglas, Riyadh Air currently has two major gaps in its airline partnerships — North-Western Europe and India — and it wants to cover those.
Speaking to reporters in Delhi, while Douglas did not elaborate on the likely talks between Riyadh Air and the Indian airlines, he said that the conversations at this early stage would be mostly exploratory, and expressed keenness to forge partnerships in India as long as they are a “win-win” proposition for Riyadh Air as well as the potential partner airline.
The Riyadh Air CEO is bullish on the Indian-Saudi Arabia air traffic and sees significant opportunities in both point-to-point traffic between Riyadh — which will serve as the airline’s central hub — and India, as well as transfer traffic between India and Western destinations with the Saudi Arabian capital serving as a connecting hub.
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But unlike other West Asian hub airports and their flagship airlines that connect flyers from India travelling onwards to destinations in Europe and North America in vast numbers, Riyadh Air feels that point-to-point traffic between India and Saudi Arabia will form the baseload of its India operations as travel demand between the two countries themselves is expected to surge in the coming years.
Notably, India’s aviation establishment wants to see homegrown carriers dominate international passenger traffic from and to India and major Indian airports transform into international hubs competing with major connecting hubs like Dubai and Doha. For this reason, India has been loath to expand the authorised capacity under bilateral air services agreements with various countries in Asia. But Douglas believes Riyadh Air and Saudi Arabia cannot be viewed from that lens.
“Riyadh (airport) today has 93 per cent point-to-point (traffic) and there is only 7 per cent in Riyadh which is transfer (traffic)…that isn’t going to fundamentally change anytime soon,” Douglas said, adding that Riyadh is polar opposite to certain hub airports in neighbouring West Asian countries that have over 80 per cent of traffic as transfer traffic.
“We (Saudi Arabia) are not using anywhere near the limit on the existing bilateral (flying rights between India and Saudi Arabia). There is plenty of headroom…At the moment we are not constrained by that,” he said.
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Saudi Arabia targets to have 7.5 million visitors from India annually by 2030. The number of Indians travelling to Saudi Arabia increased by 50 per cent in 2023 to more than 1.5 million.
