Saudi Arabia looks east to drive aviation growth
April 12, 2025
Saudi Arabia’s aviation strategy is starting to bear fruit with Asian airlines as the Kingdom seeks to dramatically increase international tourist arrivals as part of its Vision 2030 goals.
Speaking at the Routes Asia event in Perth, Majid Khan, CEO of the Saudi Air Connectivity Program (ACP), said boosting air links with Asia-Pacific markets was key to unlocking the next phase of growth.
“Asia Pacific is a very important market for us,” Khan told Aerospace Global News.
“Vision 2030 is a national tourism strategy, and according to our national tourism strategy, we need to attract 150 million tourists by 2030. We have crossed 100 million but for the international part, we had 27 million visitors last year and we need to increase that to 70 million internationals.”
To support that growth, the ACP has been aggressively courting new international airlines and encouraging the expansion of existing routes to the east.
“From Asia, during the last year, we have seen the entry of Cathay Pacific, China Southern, China Eastern and Air China into Saudi Arabia – all that happened in one year,” said Khan.
“China Southern started from Shenzhen into Riyadh, China Eastern from Shanghai. Actually they started with three weekly, now they’ve increased to six weekly. It’s a good success story. Air China from Beijing and obviously Cathay from Hong Kong, which is adding a fourth flight. They started with three weekly flights; the fourth flight starts from April 5.”
Saudi Arabia’s strategic location is also seen as a key advantage as global aviation patterns evolve. “Saudi Arabia has got an impressive geographical location between East and West,” Khan said.
“We can see that after the Russian airspace has been closed, more and more European carriers are moving westbound towards USA and Canada. That gives an opportunity… Saudi Arabia is a good transfer point, where you can fly from Asia into Riyadh, and then we have a huge network of 29 airports in Saudi.”
Western Europe remains a top priority, with new routes opening to cities including Paris and Rome. “Last year, we got 12 new airlines. ITA started from Rome. Air France is starting later this year five times a week from Paris. Approximately we got 1.5 million additional seats last year, and 22 new routes.”
Khan said both full-service and low-cost carriers are being targeted to boost connectivity and frequencies.
“We would like to have high frequencies to all the major cities. London, for example, has Saudia, BA which has just increased its flights from Heathrow, and Virgin is starting a daily flight, so it’s three carriers on one route. Still, we have huge indirect flows through Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul and Doha. So we need to pump a lot of capacity in.”
