Ticket sales for Delta’s upcoming flights to Saudi Arabia have been “softer than anticipated,” the airline’s president said this week, but he expects demand to pick up as the launch date nears and fighting in the Middle East hopefully abates.
“We think this is going to be temporary,” Peter Carter told new website Semafor in an interview from Riyadh.
Carter did not provide sales figures or say how much ground the carrier hopes to make up in the coming months.
Delta’s nonstop service between Atlanta and Riyadh is scheduled to launch Oct. 23. Flights will initially operate daily, then switch to three times weekly after Oct. 30.
The connection is timed to coincide with the Future Investment Initiative, a major business and innovation conference held in Riyadh.
If the route comes online as planned, Delta will be the first U.S. carrier to fly nonstop to Saudi Arabia in decades. The only airline currently connecting the two countries is Saudia, which serves New York-JFK and Washington Dulles.
A number of international airlines have suspended service to destinations in the Middle East due to renewed fighting between the U.S. and Iran. But Carter told Semafor that the war may indirectly benefit Saudi Arabia’s capital city.
“Dubai has been viewed as a safe haven, and I think this conflict changed that, and now Riyadh is seen as the regional safe haven,” he said.
Earlier this week, aviation blog Enilria reported that Delta has sold only five seats on a Nov. 4 flight from Atlanta to Riyadh. The outlet cited a seat map for the flight, which appears as part of the booking process.
Similarly, One Mile at a Time found very few seats have been sold on any of Delta’s Atlanta-Riyadh flights through the last week of October. On some dates, no seats were listed as occupied.
Airlines typically do not release booking data for individual flights, leaving seat maps as the best, if not totally accurate, approximation.
