The Middle East remains in turmoil, and many international carriers have abandoned plans to resume flights to the region as tensions between Iran and the United States show no sign of coming to a diplomatic (and peaceful) conclusion. Against that backdrop, however, Delta Air Lines is pushing ahead with plans to launch a new non-stop service to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Admittedly, Riyadh has been largely out of the line of missile and drone attack, despite an attack on the U.S. consulate during the early days of the conflict, although the timing for Delta to be launching a new 9,695 km route does seem, well, odd to say the least.
After all, U.S. airlines have currently suspended popular flights to Tel Aviv, United’s non-stop service to Dubai remains grounded, and American Airlines has handed over its service between Philadelphia and Doha to Qatar Airways. There’s little appetite for operating flights to the Middle East when the security situation could change at a moment’s notice.
Delta, however, intends to launch non-stop Atlanta to Riyadh services on October 23 aboard its Airbus A350-900. The service will initially operate daily, although it won’t be long before it reduces in frequency to a three-times-weekly service.
On Wednesday, Delta President Peter Carter confirmed the route was going ahead as planned, saying: “Delta’s new nonstop service to Riyadh is a meaningful step in connecting our customers to one of the world’s most important and fast-growing regions.”
Carter added: “Through our Atlanta hub, we’re making travel between the United States and Saudi Arabia more direct and more accessible, while delivering the premium experience, reliability and care customers expect from Delta.”
So, what’s going on here? Why does Delta seem so focused on launching this route?
We’ve known that Delta was going to launch non-stop flights to Riyadh since July 2024, when the airline announced a major strategic partnership with Riyadh Air, the upstart airline being bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund.
Now that Riyadh Air has launched and is adding more and more routes, this is just the moment for Delta to add its service to the Saudi capital.
Officially, of course, Delta is launching its new Riyadh service as a Point A to Point B service, extolling the many new tourist resorts that have opened in Saudi Arabia in the last couple of years. The Riyadh Air partnership does, however, have an all-important interline and codeshare agreement attached.
Passengers traveling on Delta’s flight to Riyadh won’t necessarily be ending there, but could, at some point in the near future, book a connecting flight through to Riyadh Air’s onward network, such as Mumbai.
No such bookings are currently available, so, for now, at least, Delta will have to convince enough people to end their journey in Saudi Arabia. What the airline’s load factor (aviation speak for the percentage of occupied seats on average on any given route) looks like hasn’t been revealed.
Typically, in these types of situations, airlines are offered all manner of incentives, including financial, to launch a route that might not seem, on the face of it, to be commercially viable. It’s a lot easier to operate a near-empty plane if someone else is footing the bill, after all.
That’s not necessarily the case in this situation, although it’s hard to imagine that Delta has solid forecasts to suggest that the Riyadh route will be a rip-roaring success.
Take the now axed American Airlines services to Doha. That proved successful, not because passengers were ending their journeys in Qatar, but because the vast majority were connecting onto Qatar Airways services to Asia. The same goes for United’s flights to Dubai, although to a slightly lesser extent, given Dubai’s popularity as a destination in itself.
But even with that being the case, United isn’t set to relaunch services to Dubai for the foreseeable future, and the government of Dubai is offering incentives to lure tourists back to the city this winter.
Saudi Arabia wasn’t that popular before the Iran conflict. I can’t imagine how little interest there is in visiting the country at the moment.
