Managers in travel and tourism offices said that despite the Cabinet’s decision to allow non-Kuwaitis to enter the country starting from the beginning of August after vaccination with two doses of Pfizer or AstraZeneca, or Moderna or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson, the reservation numbers of arriving passengers for August is very low, Al-Rai daily reported.
The reluctance of the travelers is due to their fear of repeating the scenario of August last year, which has terrified many. After the state closed the airport many passengers got stuck in the third country.
They expected the rate of reservations to increase significantly during the first two weeks of August after arrivals were assured that the government would actually put the decision to open the airport into effect and that it would not back down from that as it did previously.
On the other hand, they noted the high demand of citizens to travel during July, especially during the Eid al-Adha holiday, indicating that the seats available on various airlines during the Eid period may have been booked completely.
Limiting the airport’s capacity to 3,500 passengers per day jumped ticket prices by about 200 percent, but this did not discourage Kuwaitis from traveling, as the percentage of reservations increased by about 300 percent during the current month compared to the previous month, indicating that the most popular destinations for the next month among the Kuwaitis, especially on Eid included Turkey and all its destinations (Bodrum, Antalya, and Trabzon), Dubai, Cairo, Greece, Riyadh, and the Maldives, while London was low in the list.
Carrying capacity
For his part, a member of the Board of Directors of the Travel Offices Association and Director General of the Ticket Office, Abdul Rahman Al-Kharafi, said that the price fire that travelers are facing now is due to the failure to raise the capacity by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, although the Council of Ministers decided last May to increase the number of arriving passengers on commercial flights coming from abroad to 5,000 passengers per day instead of the decision that was in place to receive only 1,000 arrivals.
He added that the airport’s capacity was raised last week only to 3,500 passengers, and the number of passengers allowed on board the planes coming to Kuwait was increased from 35 to 70 passengers only.