Egypt Airshow: Red Sea Airlines marks its second anniversary

The airline is primarily a leisure carrier and has tapped into the rapidly growing market in Central Asia, the airline’s director of ground operations, Ahmed Mohamed El-Gendy said.

“Demand there is so high. Whenever I open a flight, tour operators from there book all the seats. Because we’re a low-cost carrier, we can give them a competitive price.” The airline is operating from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as well as from the Caucasus – Armenia – and Eastern Europe – Romania and Moldova.

At present, western European destinations are largely in Germany and Italy, but the company plans to expand its route map in that region when its new aircraft arrive. The company’s primary destinations for inbound tourists are Hurghada and Sharm El Sheikh, on Egypt’s Red Sea coast.

“We’re fully loaded to the east and want to go more to the west and Middle East,” said El-Gendy. The company will be able to handle that extra demand when the two new 737-800s, being acquired on lease purchase, arrive in Q1 2025.

The benefits of operating a single type and model are obvious in terms of fleet commonality, which both eases the maintenance burden and also prevents any argument about salary between pilots on different types of aircraft.

The current problems in the Middle East had a severe initial effect on bookings from western Europe, “because not everybody is aware of the distance between [the problems] and here. At the beginning, it was really affecting us hard.” Curiously, numbers from eastern Europe were not affected so much.“But now they are returning very quickly. We’ve recovered 100% of the flights and even have demand we can’t supply.”