Dublin Airport Authority International

DUBAI: Domestic passenger traffic in Riyadh’s main airport has returned to nearly 60 percent capacity, after closing for more than two months during the summer.

All flights in, out, and within Saudi Arabia were grounded in March as part of the Kingdom’s policies to help curb the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). While international flights will not fully resume until January, domestic flights restarted at the end of May.

“Domestically, we’ve seen a considerable return to traffic. So, we would be in the 50 to 60 percent return of traffic to pre-COVID-19 levels,” said Nicholas Cole, CEO of DAA International, the Irish company which manages Terminal 5 at King Khalid International Airport (KKIA) on behalf of Riyadh Airports Co. (RAC).

Cole told Arab News that numbers began to recover quickly after domestic flights resumed in May, but he forecast that a return to 100 percent of levels seen before COVID-19 would not happen until “the middle of next year.” That is mainly due to the lack of international traffic feeding into the domestic flights and the reduction in pilgrims flying.

DAA International is owned by the Irish government and manages 16 airports around the world, including operations in Paphos and Larnaca, in Cyprus, Beirut, Riyadh, Doha, Manama, and Muscat.