JED–RUH: the world’s fastest-growing domestic route of 2024

🇸🇦🇮🇳 JED-RUH (Jeddah-Riyadh) emerged as the world's fastest-growing domestic route this year with a 10% increase in seat capacity, closely followed by BOM-DEL (Mumbai-Delhi), recording a 9% growth, signalling the economic resilience of these markets, robust travel demand, and the broader economic and infrastructure progress underway in both countries.

Saudi Arabia and India will continue to be economic bright spots in 2025. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook (Oct '24) projects India to lead the world’s "Emerging markets and developing economies" with 6.5% growth (real GDP), while Saudi Arabia follows with a solid 4.6%. Such growth would continue to fuel travel demand and capacity expansion.

On the international front, two routes to the Kingdom ranked among the global top 10: CAI-JED in the second spot with a 14% YoY growth, while DXB-RUH stood at sixth place, recording growth of 8%.

Jeju-Seoul (CJU-GMP) remains the world’s busiest domestic route, with 14 million seats, but growth has slowed to 3%.

Japanese routes, such as Fukuoka-Tokyo Haneda and Tokyo Haneda-Okinawa, recorded modest growth of 1%, while routes in Australia, Vietnam, and China faced capacity declines.

Data source: OAG's busiest flight routes of 2024

(This write-up is for educational/informational purposes only; views my own; happy to amend inaccuracies, if any)