JEDDAH, 15 August 2004 — Saudi Arabian Airlines is expected to carry a total of about 5.3 million passengers by the end of this summer. The airline will operate 8,930 scheduled and non-scheduled international flights and 21,771 scheduled and non-scheduled domestic flights during this period.
The airline has increased its domestic seat capacity for the season to nearly 50,000 by raising the number of scheduled flights to several tourist destinations in the Kingdom. These include 89 flights each week on the Riyadh/Jeddah sector, 28 on the Riyadh/Abha sector, 32 on the Jeddah/Abha sector, 3 on the Riyadh/Dawadimi sector, and 2 on the Jeddah/Dawadimi sector.
Weekly flights between Riyadh and Arar have been increased to 10, and between Jeddah and Arar to 9. Also, there are 389 non-scheduled flights with a total seating capacity of 99,776.
The international network includes 2 weekly flights each to Malaga and Prague, 1 to Venice, 4 to Sharm Al-Sheikh, 3 to Salalah in Oman. A total of 119 other weekly flights offer seat capacity of 37,013 to Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, Damascus, Amman, London, Paris, Kuala Lumpur and Dubai. Flights between the Kingdom and Kuwait have been increased to three while one flight has been added to the Doha schedule. The airline has also increased flights to certain stations in Asia.
Meanwhile, Saudia’s online reservation system, introduced 18 months ago, has been used by 215,177 passengers, and within five months of introduction of the self check-in terminals, 198,946 passengers have used the system to get their boarding cards and make seat selections.
The average service time of each user was 32 seconds. This service is presently available at the mainline stations of Jeddah, Riyadh and Madinah, and will be introduced at the King Fahd International Airport in Dammam soon.
The interactive voice response system receives one call every 73 seconds with the total standing at nearly 1.3 million.
