The Ministry of Haj would seize bank guarantees of Umrah tour operators if they failed to provide services they had promised pilgrims before they embarked on their journey to Madinah.

Mohammed Abdul Rahman Al-Bijawi, the ministry’s director, said: “We have deployed 636 employees who are trained in 10 different functions to ensure that the level of services to pilgrims is maintained pilgrims in the city.”

The ministry, he said, was paying special attention toward services provided by Umrah tour operators to pilgrims.

“We want to establish direct interaction with the pilgrims to understand their problems and seek suggestions from them to improve our functioning,” he said. “Every complaint received from pilgrims will only help us to adopt an effective system that will serve them better.”

According to Al-Bijawi, the constant and strict supervision of tour operators yielded good result as services to pilgrims improved significantly.

“The Haj Ministry has been in successful in ensuring the comfort of pilgrims in the holy city by directly monitoring contracts of housing units for pilgrims that enable us to keep a tab on crowd movement,” he said.

He said the mode of registering complaints via SMS in the holy city helped the Haj Ministry overcome some of negative effects in operational procedures. Last season, the Haj Ministry received 6,840 complaints through the SMS system, he said.

The evaluation of tour operators as well as Haj Ministry personnel is being done on a daily basis,” Al-Bijawi said, adding that the Prince Mohammed International Airport in Madinah was also playing an important role in the smooth movement of pilgrims to the city.