Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 strategy includes the development of airports and establishment of airlines to help deliver its ambitious goal to become a major aviation hub and attract hundreds of millions of passengers every year, a top official confirmed on Thursday.

Speaking at the ministerial session held on the sidelines of the “Wings India 2024”, Abdulaziz Al-Duailej, President of the General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA), said the kingdom has a “comprehensive plan” to establish itself as the civil aviation hub in the Middle East.

Part of the plan is to “upgrade and develop airports, airlines, aircraft and facilities, including shipping and logistics services,” the state-owned Saudi Press Agency (SPA) quoted the aviation chief as saying.

The kingdom hopes to boost its air connectivity to more than 250 destinations worldwide, as well as attract $100 billion in investments and 330 million travellers.

Out of the total target traffic, Saudi Arabia hopes that only 33 million will be travelling transit through the kingdom

“We aim for only 10% of these 330 million passengers to be transit passengers, which emphasizes our focus on sustainable and integrated growth,” Duailej said.

Saudi Arabia also looks to serve as a “global logistics platform”, providing links to three continents.

“The kingdom hopes to bring about a major qualitative shift in air freight and logistics services to increase the capacity of air freight from 0.8 million tonnes to 4.5 million tonnes by 2030, as this represents one of the most ambitious initiatives to attract global air carriers, logistics service providers and multinational companies to the kingdom,” the official said.

In 2022, Saudi Arabia announced it was looking to attract 330 million visitors to the kingdom by 2030, three times the level in 2019.

Early last year, the kingdom announced the creation of a new airline Riyadh Air, owned by the state’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

(Writing by Cleofe Maceda; editing by Seban Scaria) Seban.scaria@lseg.com