First Eurowings flight lands in Salalah

Muscat: With 310 tourists onboard, the first direct flight from Germany landed at the Salalah International Airport on Saturday, the Ministry of Tourism (MoT) said.
Officials at MoT said the tourists flew to Salalah on a charter flight from Germany.
Eurowings is the first European carrier to provide a direct flight to Salalah in Oman. “The flight landed at 2.50 am on Saturday and left at 4 am in the morning,” according an official at Oman Airports.
Besides bringing German tourists, MoT said 178 passengers also arrived from Slovakia on Saturday. “A weekly flight will operate from Slovakia to Salalah airport every Saturday. The first flight carrying 178 passengers arrived in Oman at the beginning of the winter season,” the official said.
A senior official at Eurowings, the low-cost airline based in Germany, said they will be operating two charter flights a week to Salalah. “We will be flying them via our tour operators from Cologne in Germany.”
The arrival of Eurowings comes at the end of the Khareef (monsoon) season in Oman.
“So we can see that the end of Khareef is not the end of the tourism season in Salalah.
Just when Khareef ends, German visitors begin coming to Salalah and we want Salalah to be a year-round destination,” Lohithakshan Kizhakkayil, a travel consultant said.
Salalah Airport welcomed more than 284,000 Khareef visitors during the June 15 August 15 period, according to the latest visitor data published by the National Centre for Statistical Information (NCSI).
NCSI also reported that out of the 529,000 people, who visited the region during the Khareef season, 93,000 arrived via Salalah Airport on 2,263 local and international flights.
As the capital of Oman’s Dhofar region, Salalah is known as the Sultanate’s ‘Second City.’
It is renowned for its annual monsoon season, known as the Khareef, which sees the desert landscape transform into lush green expanses from June to August each year.
During this peak period, the number of visitors to Salalah triples, in comparison with the rest of the year. Additionally, the Khareef festival celebrates the rainy season and draws thousands of visitors.
Salalah is famous for its unique tourist sites, which include fruit plantations and banana groves, beaches lined with coconut palms, a vibrant local culture with souqs and Omani handicrafts, and a myriad of archaeological sites displaying the Sultanate’s rich and prosperous history.
“For the last few years, we have been getting regular visitors from Austria and Switzerland, but with the arrival of Eurowings, we will be hosting regular visitors from Germany too,” the Oman Airports official noted.