JEDDAH: A news website in Saudi Arabia reported this week that “angry reactions hit the Saudi streets at the new extra charge under the name the Sept. 11 Security Charge” being imposed by British Midland International (BMI) on Saudi tourists traveling to London.
“This is downright humiliation as the increase in the price of air tickets is only imposed on Saudi citizens,” the website quoted a number of Saudis as saying. It added that the move “has serious implications and that it destroys all the roads being built to maintain links with these people after 9/11.”
The website, sabq.com, said that some observers in the Kingdom believed that the charge might have been imposed for reasons other than those announced, namely to counter the steady increase in oil prices. “If this is the reason, it is also meant to punish Saudis since Saudi Arabia is the largest oil exporting country.”
Robert Lickley, commercial development manager for BMI in Saudi Arabia, explained to Arab News yesterday the exact cause of the problem. It too involved a website — this time BMI’s own booking page. “It is a requirement by law that notification of a 9/11 surcharge is put on the ticket of every Internet booking made for flights originating from the United States,” he said, adding that in updating their website, the information concerning the 9/11 surcharge had been carried across to the BMI site that included information and booking forms for the rest of the airline’s network.
“It was a simple clerical error, and when we discovered it, we corrected it immediately,” Lickley said. “However, the error was online for sufficient time that a number of observant Saudis saw it.”
What they were unaware of was that the 9/11 surcharge information is on every Internet ticket for every airline flight originating in the US, he said.
“There are absolutely no special surcharges for flights to or from Saudi Arabia,” Lickley said. “It would be insulting and damaging to do that to a country that is so important to us as a destination and the UK’s valued trading partner. We simply would never do that.”
Lickley apologized sincerely on behalf of the airline for the mistake and for any upset or offense to Saudis the error had caused. “We at once put in place measures to ensure that this would not happen again,” he said.
Security surcharges have been a fact of life on all airlines and therefore on ticket prices for several years. They are not specific to any group or nation and help meet the cost of tightened security for airlines since 9/11.
To counter the speculation on the website that the surcharge, which does not in reality exist, was a form of concealed fuel surcharge, Lickley said: “Absolutely not. And for the record, there is no surcharge that applies specifically to Saudis or the UK/Saudi route.”
He concluded by saying that BMI had developed the UK/Saudi flights into solid commercial routes and that the airline had only recently engaged in talks with a view to increasing its presence at the three main Saudi destinations — Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam — in the coming months.
