Jeddah Airports Company began phased operations at Terminal 4 of King Abdulaziz International Airport on Sunday, with Wizz Air, AJet and SalamAir the first carriers to check in passengers there. The terminal measures 97,000 square meters and can process 15 million passengers a year, and it is the airport’s original South Terminal, opened in 1981, closed to passenger traffic in 2020, and now refitted and returned to service under a new number.
That provenance is the point. King Abdulaziz International handled a record 53.4 million passengers in 2025, and the national aviation program wants more than 90 million a year moving through Jeddah by 2030, within a target of 330 million across the Kingdom’s airports. Between the record and the target sits a construction problem measured in years and billions. Reopening a terminal the airport already owned is the shortest route to the next 15 million seats of capacity, and the company has taken it.
The carrier list reads as a map of who is filling the airport. After Sunday’s three, Fly Jinnah and Nesma Airlines move on Monday, Akasa Air on Tuesday, SyrianAir and Pegasus on 1 October, and Azerbaijan Airlines and Tunisair on 3 October. Ten carriers serving Pakistan, India, Turkiye, Oman, Central Europe, the Caucasus, North Africa and Syria, nearly all of them flying narrow-body aircraft on point-to-point schedules. This is the traffic of the Umrah economy and the expatriate workforce, the two demand engines that run year-round rather than seasonally, and it has been growing faster than the infrastructure hosting it.
What the moves vacate matters as much as what they fill. Fly Jinnah and Akasa Air are relocating out of the Hajj and Umrah complex, and Nesma, SyrianAir and Pegasus out of the North Terminal. The pilgrimage facility returns to the traffic it was built for as the Umrah season builds, while Terminal 4 carries its own dedicated check-in area for Hajj and Umrah groups, so organized pilgrim traffic can scale without pressing on the main terminals. The reshuffle is less about adding gates than about sorting flows: pilgrims, leisure and labor traffic each get infrastructure matched to how they actually move.
The pace is deliberate. Two or three airlines per move date, spread across a week, is the cautious way to commission a terminal. Cutover failures in baggage handling and passenger systems are how airport openings become news for the wrong reasons, and phasing keeps any failure small. The company is advising passengers to confirm their departure terminal through their airline or the airport’s official channels before traveling, which is what a managed migration sounds like.
Jeddah’s move is one entry in a year of measured capacity additions across the system: a new carrier flying from Dammam since mid-September, Riyadh Air adding routes city by city, and now a fourth terminal at the western gateway. None of these arrived as a single grand opening; each adds capacity in the increment the demand can absorb. For a program with 2030 targets of this size, the operating style is notably incremental.
The measure of Terminal 4 will be taken twice: this week, in whether ten carriers move without disruption, and over the winter schedule, in whether the freed space in the Hajj complex and the North Terminal converts into higher pilgrim throughput and new frequencies. A building that first opened in 1981 has been returned to work; the target it serves is dated 2030.