Delta CEO Twists Himself In Knots Trying To Defend His Saudi Hypocrisy

Delta Air Lines is partnered up with new Saudi Arabian airline Riyadh Air, in addition to their SkyTeam partnership with Saudia. And they’re going to fly from Atlanta to Riyadh. Yet Delta

1. once promised they wouldn’t fly to Saudi Arabia, or partner with a Saudi airline because Jews weren’t welcome, and
2. criticized Middle East airlines for taking government subsidies, even trying to get their U.S. flying curtailed by the government – yet here Delta is working with the country’s public investment fund on its flight.

CNN’s Richard Quest asked Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian why on earth they’re going to fly to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia? “Is it for O&D, origin and destination, or is it ultimately to build out through connectivity?” And Bastian explained bringing U.S. passengers to Riyadh. It’s not about the convenience for Saudi Arabians.

This makes sense. Delta has a new partnership with government-backed Riyadh Air and they clearly made it lucrative for Delta to fly. Saudi Arabia wants stronger U.S. ties and wants more U.S. business travel, as they try to diversify their economy beyond oil.

The situation with Saudi Arabia is different than it was when Delta said they’d never fly there. The country was on the verge of joining the Abraham Accords and recognizing Israel before the October 7th attacks. And while they’ve said they cannot do so until there’s a clear path to a Palestinian State, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is expected to visit the U.S. next month and if the cease fire in Gaza holds and Hamas can be displaced, a deal could be brokered in the coming year for that to happen. (Saudi Arabia sees Hamas as an enemy, and proxy for its sponsors which are Saudi rivals.)

Yet as Bastian tries to defend partnering with Mideast airlines, and subsidies, after having spent years arguing that Mideast carriers that they don’t partner with should be blocked from the U.S. market because of government subsidies (Etihad, Emirates, Qatar) it’s more than a little bit awkward.

"We live in the experience world, the experience economy, and people are willing to invest far more in themselves."@Delta CEO Ed Bastien on his airline's new route between Atlanta and Saudi Arabia. pic.twitter.com/482eg39dnB

— Quest Means Business (@questCNN) October 28, 2025

Quest points out that Delta didn’t partner with Qatar and Etihad (American) or Emirates (United), but that “He who came to late shows wisest in a sense because this is going to be the growth area in the region.” and Bastian acknowledges that they were “vocal over time about the subsidies and the lack of a level playing field here amongst the Middle Eastern carriers” and he tries out a line to distinguish their past arguments over subsidies with why they’re ok now?

[W]e were not ever even contemplating partnerships with those three airlines because they don’t have a local market. They basically exist to take traffic between two other home markets, neither of which are theirs, and we didn’t want to have someone else live off our hard-earned territory and the work that we’ve done.

Bastian suggests it is immoral to connect traffic between two countries over a third country. What an odd take!

• The original airline that built this model, and was criticized for taking passengers that rightfully ‘belonged’ to someone else, was KLM which built its Amsterdam hub for connections. And Delta has an antitrust immunized, revenue-sharing joint venture with KLM, and owns a stake in Air France KLM.
  
• Their joint venture with Korean Air is premised on utilizing the Seoul hub to connect passengers between the U.S. and other countries throughout Asia. Delta moved its Tokyo connecting hub – which was premised on connecting passengers between the U.S., over Japan (rights which came as part of the spoils of World War II through their Northwest acquisition), to other countries in Asia, over to Seoul!

Bastian acknowledges working not just with Riyadh Air itself but “a couple of years with the PIF” which is Saudi Arabia’s state investment fund. Yet he keeps insisting that state-backed airlines are now fine, as long as they have a large domestic market.

[T]he size of the home market which is a country with 35 million people versus what you have locals in Doha or Dubai, which is a small, small fraction of that.

This doesn’t come close to withstanding scrutiny.

• Dubai carries over 90 million passengers a year, nearly three times as many as Riyadh.
• Connecting traffic over Dubai is a way to support more air travel for Dubai itself, which has helped build Dubai itself.
• However, even if nearly half the travelers at Dubai are connecting – which they aren’t (remember that Emirates itself, which carries most of the passengers connecting over Dubai, isn’t more than 60% of themarket) that would still mean more local travel than Riyadh.
  
• And, if anything, a large local market should make the subsidies less needed!

There are more people flying from the world to Dubai than to Riyadh despite Bastian’s protestations of how many people make each their home.

Bastian is also now fine with state-backed airline startups as long as they’re ultimately profitable – which, of course, is exactly where Emirates has been for years and Etihad is today.

I know the team at Riyadh Air is destined to prove their own weight. And obviously, with PIF starting them, they’re going to require a considerable amount of startup investment. I think that model is going to be very successful and very profitable for PIF.

What’s the size of the Atlanta – Riyadh city pair, if he wants to talk home markets? How much of Saudi Arabia travel is Haaj pilgramiges? That’s clearly not the local market Delta is targeting. I’d note that the whole point of Riyadh Air is to separate out global premium business travel from the more conservative Islam-focused and Hajj-oriented customers who will fly the other state-backed carrier Saudia (indeed, Riyadh Air is expected to eventually serve alcohol).

“Riyadh is a real market and Dubai isn’t” is a pretty strange line to hang his hat on for why subsidies are good in one case and not the other. And the size of the Riyadh business market is because of… the Saudi state, not private business. Meanwhile, only local markets justify flights, as though Delta doesn’t live off of connections in Atlanta. Bastian also suggests leisure travel to Saudi Arabia will benefit Delta but certainly Riyadh isn’t the leisure market that Dubai is.

Eight years ago at the height of Delta’s campaign against the big Gulf airlines, I wrote that Delta was never actually against subsidies they were only against subsidies for others. They took plenty of subsidies themselves! Ed Bastian has even claimed that the lesson of the Covid-19 pandemic is government would always be there with bailouts for the airline industry if needed. He’s even attributed the strength of the U.S. airline industry to federal government support. Not for nothing but Delta was even fined for using Covid subsidis to fund executive pay packages.

The truth is that there’s no hypocrisy: Delta’s position, then and now, is they favor what is good for Delta. But they don’t feel comfortable actually saying something so craven. So they’ve come up with this line that government subsidies were bad before but good now because of the size of the local market. It doesn’t make any sense at all, but that’s not the point. Interviewers like Richard Quest aren’t really going to challenge it. And pretty soon it just becomes ‘old news’, questions that have been ‘asked and answered’.