JEDDAH, 8 April 2004 — Expatriates working in travel agencies are counting their days as their Saudi replacements are being trained.
Inquiries at travel agencies show that authorities have begun visiting them to find out details of expatriate employees such as names, nationalities, validity of iqamas and period of employment. This has created considerable unease.
Airline and travel agency sources say clear directions have been given by the Supreme Commission for Tourism. “They have given a breathing time to expatriates in this sector,” the sources said.
According to sources, the Ministry of Labor considers that the present 18 percent Saudization average in over 2,800 travel agencies in the Kingdom must be increased to 81 percent within the next three years. All front desk jobs in travel agencies must be 100 percent Saudized within two years.
Although school and college graduates are being shortlisted for training at the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) and other institutes in order to prepare them for employment, many are not inclined to take up jobs in this sector.
“They prefer to find employment in banks and with the national airline,” an IPA source said. First of all, all new graduates must be trained in English followed by training in basic computer skills. Then they can be trained for the travel business, the IPA source explained.
A recent meeting dealing with the problems of Saudization in the travel industry announced a new Sledgehammer project which provides instant fares at the click of a mouse. The instant fare loader (IFL), a client-side application software for airline users, allows for the insertion, cloning, retrieval and the update of fares that can be published both on local and global markets.
During his presentation of Sledgehammer instant fares, Rashid Al-Mugait, chairman of Beirut-based Stargate-Cyberactive, said the new global system’s booking engine would be available locally from April 15. It will be found very useful in the context of Saudization since employees will not have to refer to so many documents while calculating a fare.
At the click of a mouse, any point-to-point fare can be accessed with the help of the software through the Internet. “In the current Saudization campaign, Saudis employed in the travel trade could be trained within a couple of hours,” he said.
