Founding Day: Travel searches for Saudi Arabia on Skyscanner almost double in 2023

Saudi Arabia was Skyscanner’s top searched travel destination by GCC residents in the week leading up to Saudi Founding Day, the global travel marketplace revealed on Tuesday.

Data collected compared searches that were made for February 1 to 13 and February 17 to 25 this year with last year’s data and found that searches for Saudi Arabia by GCC residents rose by 98 percent, the United Arab Emirates increased by 99 percent and Qatar by over 2,000 percent.

Travel searches for the week of Founding Day 2023 were up 83 percent compared to 2022.

Currently, the overall best time to book flights from Saudi Arabia is on average 21 weeks before departure and the cheapest day of the week to travel from Saudi Arabia is a Sunday, the travel company said in a statement.

However, Skyscanner has data crunched millions of flight bookings over the last year across its most popular destinations and the results reveal this does not in fact tell the whole story.

Not only do these hacks change depending on the destination but also, travelers will find differing results for the same destination but a different month. From Jeddah, for instance, the cheapest day of the week to travel to London in August is a Tuesday compared to flights from Riyadh, which is a Thursday.

The company revealed that the best time to book a flight from Riyadh to Dubai in December is 12 weeks ahead whereas from Abu Dhabi to London, booking 23 weeks in advance is cheaper.

The cheapest day of the week to travel to Bangkok from Riyadh in March is a Monday but in June, it is a Wednesday, data showed.

Skyscanner also analyzed international travel searches and the top 5 were Egypt (19 percent increase), Morocco (41 percent), India (83 percent), “Everywhere” (over 497 percent), and Pakistan (57 percent).

Flight bookings made more than a month before departure in February 2023 were up 7 percent compared to 2022, whilst flight bookings made less than a month before departure were down 6 percent from the previous year.