100 cities by 2030: Riyadh Air COO underlines ambitious goal

Connecting Saudi Arabia’s capital city to the world by focusing on “point-to-point” travel: this is the core focus that the chief operating officer of Riyadh Air is committed to achieving.

Peter Bellew, in his conversation with Gulf Business at the Dubai Airshow on Tuesday, said that Riyadh Air will differentiate itself in the region through its digital operations, a technologically empowered staff cadre, and its attitude towards its passengers.

It’s not every day that an airline of this scale and ambition gets launched. What are some of the challenges that you face as you work on launching an airline from scratch?

I think the biggest challenge is remaining focused on what the most urgent tasks are, because the excitement can get you to lose track as there’s so much going on. One of the challenges, generally, for all airlines around the planet at the moment is hiring great talent.

We have hired our first 20 pilots, and we’ve managed to get people with nearly 800 years of experience [combined]. We have to recruit 700 pilots, 6,000 cabin crew and 1,000 engineers in the next three years.

So we’re working really hard to find incredible people to help us start this. I think this is the biggest challenge for all of the aviation industry right now.

Are procurement and delivery lines a challenge?

It’s going to take an impeccable attention to detail from us at every stage, every day of the week, until we launch. That’s something that we’re very conscious of, and we are working very hard to ensure it is on track. I don’t see anything at the moment that scares me. But we plan to be on top of that.

From your decades of experience, what are the lessons that you’ve chosen to apply for a new airline?

I think it’s a matter of prioritising things that are the most risky followed by keeping the team focused on those tasks.

When you’re in a startup situation, you know that there are 100 different things that need to be done. But, there’s 20 things to do that actually comprise 80 per cent of the risk. You can distill this down even further and prioritise another top 3. It then comes down to just keeping all of us focused on the things that could be a problem and ensure you avoid those pitfalls.

Additionally, after moving to Saudi Arabia, I experienced how digitally integrated the systems are. From renting a house to the whole legal system, banking, immigration, everything.

That makes our jobs much easier than I had anticipated to bring people on board and into the country.

Can you explain why you choose to call Riyadh Air a digitally native airline?

To start with, there is no paper in the office and the thought is that our pilots and cabin crew won’t ever have to use paper for anything. Everything on the operations side will be completely digital, including the engineering.

Because we don’t have old baggage, and we are new, we can pick and choose the best systems that are out there. We can piece them together in the optimum way by using all the latest technologies and putting everything in the cloud. And that way, we plan to be quite nimble.

On the customer side of things, we will implement systems that will make passenger boardings completely seamless and, of course, paperless. Once people book with us and register with us, their face will be their ticket. They will not need anything else.

I think everyone will be pleasantly surprised when they journey with us, as it’ll be probably the most unique experience that we plan to bring in 2025. We are in the process of acquiring and adopting the latest technologies that’s out there in the world right now and ensuring their deployment when we begin flying.

How do you plan to integrate digitally non-native passengers?

Part of what we’re trying to do is make the technology friendly for our own staff, and in turn for the customers. The plan is to know more about those who choose to travel with us.

The hope is that we can empower our staff to do something which is unusual in airlines: that is to be kind to people and treat them as if they’re a member of our own family.

We want our staff to have empathy with our passengers and empower as well as train them to be able to make decisions because they have the technology in front of them to allow them to make decisions. This can be allowing them make changes to a customer’s seating, or their journey or their meal preferences or whatever is needed at that moment. And they’ll have that ability to do it through the technology we design and implement.

How will Riyadh Air differentiate itself from the other carriers in the region?

Saudi Arabia is a country of 36 million people and Riyadh is home to some 10 million people. However, at the moment, it is the least connected capital among the G20 countries.
There are a limited number of direct flights connecting Riyadh to international cities. We want to change that and to link up Riyadh, with all the great capitals in Europe, as well as to other parts of the world.

We expect most of our traffic to be point-to-point. If you compare this to other carriers in the region, up to 90 per cent of the customers are just connecting through that airport, they’re not stopping there. I expect it to be the other way around with us. Riyadh Air expects to have between 80 to 90 per cent of its passengers coming and going from its home base in Riyadh. So that makes us completely different from other airlines in the region.

How are you approaching your scale up to 2030?

We will be serving 100 cities with 170 aircraft by 2030. We expect that we will be connecting all the main capitals and provide direct services to all the major aviation hubs around the world.

How are you mapping your carbon footprint and how will you manage it?

Riyadh Air’s approach is a bit different than what has been done traditionally in the past.

We will monitor our carbon footprint on a strategic level, but we will use the data that’s coming out of our new systems – from our aircrafts to our day-to-day operations, to give our our crew visibility and direct responsibility about how much carbon they’ve used themselves. For example, this can be the cabin crew and their in-flight carbon impact that day, followed by what they could do to improve it in the future, how they rank via their colleagues and how their footprint is compared to their peers. We will give our own people the power to impact the carbon usage on a granular level.