New Muscat airport aims to boost Oman’s economy

20 March 2018
Work on the new airport’s next phase should start sooner than later

Oman marks an important milestone with today’s opening of the new Muscat International airport.

The new airport is several years overdue; the rapid annual increases in passenger and cargo, estimated at a compounded average of 14 and 11 per cent a year, respectively, since 2010, have resulted in major overcrowding issues at the old airport over the past few years.

The new airport will not only be much bigger than the old one, it also promises to offer a better passenger experience by featuring electronic visa (e-visa) gates that would allow visitors to skip the usual long queues for the processing of visas upon arrival.

Such new processes are imperative if the travel and logistics sector are to deliver continued growth, as outlined in the sultanate’s latest five-year development plan (2016-2020). Oman’s logistics sector for example is expected to contribute $7.8bn to Oman’s gross domestic product by 2020, up from $4.8bn in 2014.

The new airport is also expected to open up expansion opportunities for the national carrier, Oman Air. Despite recent setbacks that include higher losses in 2016, the carrier plans to add new routes this year and increase flight frequencies on existing routes.

Authorities have announced that the carrier will undergo a strategic re-positioning starting this year by adopting a point-to-point model, where flights travel direct to a destination as opposed to the hub-and-spoke model, popularised by the likes of Dubai-based Emirates Airline.

RELATED: New airport fuels Oman’s logistics ambitions

It is also foreseeable that the closure since June last year of air spaces in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to Qatar air traffic provided a major incentive to open the new airport this year. This development created additional intermediary traffic, which the old airport could hardly accommodate.

In addition to a new airport terminal, Oman also opened a new cargo facility on 19 March. The facility can handle up to 350,000 tonnes of cargo annually.  However, the current pace of growth, if sustained, means the facility could reach full capacity before 2024.

With a design capacity of 12 million passengers annually, the new terminal is barely on par with the current volume of passengers that passed through the old airport, which numbered 14.04 million in 2017.

This requires Oman to work on the next phase of the new passenger terminal’s expansion that will take its capacity to 24 million passengers sooner than later.

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