Saudi Arabia · Operations · Background
In 2011 I was leading revenue management and pricing for flynas, the low-cost carrier that would go on to become the largest of its kind in the Middle East. At the time we were still early. The airline had been operating for a few years. We were building capability, expanding routes, learning the market. And then, in January 2011, Tunisia happened.
We flew to Egypt. We flew to Yemen. We flew to Lebanon. Social unrest was moving across the region faster than any model could track. Passengers were stranded. Routes were suspended. Governments were changing while tickets were already sold.
The revenue management function, which exists in normal times to optimise yield across every seat on every flight every day, became in those months something closer to crisis operations. Cancel this flight. Reroute these passengers. Reimburse these tickets. Adjust pricing on routes where demand had collapsed overnight and routes where it had spiked because people were trying to get out.
You're cancelling flights, redirecting routes, reimbursing passengers. People are stranded. You have to be very tightly integrated with the rest of the company.
The person who taught me how to do this job was a man named Keith Taylor. An American who had been the senior VP of pricing and revenue management at Southwest Airlines for sixteen years. Southwest invented the low-cost carrier model. Keith had been at the centre of that for most of its history before ending up on a consulting project at flynas.
What Keith taught me was not a formula. It was a disposition. You price the route you understand. You understand the route by knowing who is on it, why they are flying, what alternatives they have, and what they will do if your price is wrong. Revenue management is psychology as much as mathematics.
I was 27 years old, running the revenue function of an airline flying into some of the most volatile airspace in the world, being taught by one of the best practitioners in the industry. That combination was not comfortable. It was the most useful education I have received.
The Arab Spring unfolded fast. Tunisia first. Then Egypt, where we flew. Then Yemen, where we flew. Lebanon. Syria. Each one required a different response in real time, without the luxury of analysis or process. You made a call on the available information and you kept moving.
At 27, with less experience and less perspective than I have now, the pace of those months was genuinely difficult. The margin for error was small. The stakes for getting it wrong were real. Passengers who could not get home. Revenue that could not be recovered. Routes that had to be pulled before anyone had time to model the second-order effects.
A revenue function that is not integrated with operations, commercial, and customer is not a revenue function. It is a spreadsheet department. In normal conditions the seams between functions are not visible. Under pressure they are the only thing visible.
In 2011 those seams showed up fast. The teams that held were the ones where the integration was real, not just charted on an org diagram. Where the person running revenue knew what the person running ground operations was seeing, in real time, and vice versa.
That observation has applied in every operating context since. Saudi Arabia in 2026 is not in crisis. But the operating environment here asks things of international operators that are structurally similar to what the Arab Spring asked of us in 2011. Speed, integration, tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to move without complete information.
The framing Keith gave me has applied everywhere since. In private equity, where you are pricing services that people use in moments of vulnerability. In residential communities, where you are pricing a home that a family is relocating their entire life into. The variables change. The underlying question does not. Who is on the other side of this transaction, what do they actually need, and are you pricing and operating in a way that reflects that?
A good revenue manager must be a psychologist, an anthropologist, a geopolitician. Not because those are the job titles. Because the decisions the function makes, multiplied across every seat on every flight every day, depend on understanding the human being on the other side of the screen. Why did they buy this ticket. What does this route mean to them. What will they do if the price is wrong.
That is not an abstraction. In the middle of the Arab Spring, with routes to Egypt and Yemen and Lebanon active, understanding the human being on the other side of the screen was not a thought exercise. It was the job.
I left flynas at the end of 2011. I had reasons that made sense at the time. flynas eventually IPO'd. The friends I had from that period who stayed built something over the decade that followed that the people who left did not build. That lesson has stayed with me in every market since.
The operators who flame out in difficult markets are almost never the ones with the wrong strategy. They are the ones who left when the easy thing to do was to leave. The ones who built something were still there in year three, year four, year five, when the curve bent.
Saudi Arabia in 2026 is not in crisis. It is in an extraordinary period of growth. But the disposition the Arab Spring demanded, and that flynas demanded of the people who stayed through it, is exactly the disposition this market rewards now. Patient, integrated, present, willing to operate without complete information.
That is what fifteen years in this market has taught me. And it started in 2011, pricing flights into Cairo while the news was still breaking. Read this next on what the first two years of a Saudi Arabia market entry actually look like.
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