Middle East travel set to soar

YouGovSiraj director of travel & tourism research Jane Wilson discusses the region's business and leisure travel trends.

Travel by residents living in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is set to increase over the next 12 months, according to respondents to YouGovSiraj's latest travel tracker survey.

More than 60% of the 2428 business traveller respondents and almost half of the 1416 leisure traveller respondents said they expected their travel to increase and less than 10% said they expected to travel lers.

Company travel budgets had increased in the last year for more than half the respondents and more expected this trend to continue in the next 12 months. Those who travelled more frequently and in the premium classes had seen greater increases.

However, the usual class of travel was economy for most business travellers (for one-third it's premium economy) and nearly all leisure travellers and this was generally not expected to change in the next 12 months.

Conferences and exhibitions were the most common reasons for a business trip and visiting friends and family was the most common leisure trip of the past 12 months, followed by shopping holidays. However, resort holidays and cruise trips were set to show the biggest increases in the next 12 months.

Wilson's comments

These results are probably no great surprise to anyone familiar to the MENA region where the aircraft orders continue to set new records. In fact, passenger demand in the Middle East outgrew all other regions in the first half of 2007 and was triple the world average, according to statistics from IATA.

In contrast to the West where there are many more large corporations and half of business travellers travel in business class, there are many more small and independent businesses and sales people in the MENA region and they can see the direct effect on their budgets of travelling in business class.

They would perhaps prefer to be rewarded with better profits and bigger bonuses at the end of the year, so the usual class of travel is economy for most business travellers.

While the region's airlines continue to thrive by offering first class products and new carriers such as Prestige Jet (UAE), Al Khayala in Saudi and Silverjet (UK) are coming to market with businessclass only offerings, there is also room for the new budget/low-cost carriers such as Air Arabia and Jupiter Airlines (UAE), nasair and Sama (Saudi), Menajet (Lebanon) and Jazeera Airways (Kuwait).

The number of trips to conferences and exhibitions are expected to increase in the next year indicating that more junior staff are likely to be travelling. This is therefore a good time for agents and airlines alike to start building loyalty with those that have their entire travelling career ahead of them.

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