Airfares to some destinations from Kuwait have dropped by 50 to 200 percent after operations at Kuwait International Airport resumed full capacity in the last week of October.
Nassib Adnan, the deputy director of a travel agency, said the Kuwaiti Cabinet’s decision to reoperate the airport fully contributed to cutting the airfares by more than 50 percent to some destinations such as Turkey, Egypt, France, and Germany.
He said the cost of travel to the UAE, Britain, India, and the Philippines have remained high as compared to the airfares before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to tourism and travel experts, Kuwaiti citizens and expatriates are eager to travel amid receding repercussions of the coronavirus crisis locally and abroad, where many countries have reopened borders.
Airfares had soared due to the limited number of offered tickets, the experts said, noting that the pandemic had resulted in closing most airports across the globe and impounding aircraft, thus travel companies
suffered heavy losses forcing some to shut.
Fayez Al-Enezi, Head of the Kuwaiti Airways Media and Public Relations Department, told KUNA that the corporation increased flights after the cabinet decided to resume full-capacity operations at Kuwait
International Airport, effective October 24.
He expressed hope that the air travel would be restored to the pre-Covid 19 levels.
Kamal Kabsha, a tourism expert, told the news agency that airfares dropped by more than 200 percent for departing flights, but the fares for incoming ones remained high.
Airfares are largely affected by demand and offer as well as costs of main operations, he said, also noting that booking increased by 20 percent before the full resumption of the airport operations.
The complete restoration of air aviation is yet to happen because of health constraints such as obligatory quarantines and PCR tests in addition to peoples’ concerns of infection as well as uneasy measures at some airports.
Full recovery of the travel and air navigation sectors is forecast late 2022 and early 2023, however, the prediction is conditional to whether vaccinations will quell the pandemic and health restrictions are eased, Kabsha said. (KUNA)