Making way for 100 million visitors

The King Abdulaziz International Airport (KAIA) is the gateway to Jeddah, one of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent cities and a main entry point for one of the largest religious events in the world: the Islamic Hajj pilgrimages to the holy city of Mecca.

To support Jeddah’s steady growth as a regional economic and commercial centre and to better accommodate millions of pilgrims, the Kingdom’s General Authority of Civil Aviation launched, in the early 2000s, an exceptional venture to expand and modernize KAIA, turning it into a regional hub and multimodal international turntable.

Beginning in 2007, Dar provided a wide range of consultancy services to help deliver this strategic project. These services included updating the master plan and providing design review and management and construction supervision and management services. Dar was also supported by Landrum & Brown, TY Lin, Introba, Penspen, and GPO Group.

Built for modern comfort

For phase one of the expansion, the project involved the construction of a new passenger terminal building and its related support facilities as well as the airside and landside infrastructure. The project was designed to increase the annual handling capacity in the new passenger terminal to 30 million passengers, with an ultimate phase capacity of 80 million.

The passenger terminal features an ultramodern design built around ease of operations, the comfort of passengers, and efficiency for aircraft movement and ground support equipment. It caters for the aircraft mix anticipated to use KAIA, notably the Airbus A380. The design of public areas provides for comfort and safety, with state-of-the-art systems to optimize all operations.

To support the new terminal, the project also included new airside and landside infrastructure, including taxiways, service roads, and parking as well as facilities such as a new air traffic control tower, data centers, and firefighting facilities.

Welcome to the next hot spot

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is aiming to attract 100 million visits by 2030, and has invested heavily in the tourism sector to cultivate both international and domestic visitors. This project was one of several planned to manage a projected surge in air travel, with another expansion at King Salman International Airport in Riyadh and a new airport being built at NEOM, the from-scratch futuristic new city being created in the northern part of the country.

With both mega and giga-projects coming online by 2030, there will be many new reasons for potential leisure travelers from around the world to consider a trip to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the first time.

Whether to visit an ultra-luxury wellness retreat, a new mountain resort, or a UNESCO heritage site, arriving and departing from the country will be a seamless and comfortable experience at the newly-expanded KAIA.