Morocco’s Travel Revolution: High-Speed Rails and Budget Flights Transform Tourism

Morocco is opening its doors wide to road trip and discovery enthusiasts. In the recent past, visiting several regions of the kingdom during the same trip was a real headache. If it was unlikely to go from the beaches of Agadir to the medina of Fez, a day’s drive away, or to leave Rabat to try kitesurfing in Dakhla, nearly 1,700 km away, today these combinations are part of the daily life of travelers. By air or by rail, travel in Morocco has never been so fast and easy, according to Le Figaro.

After a forced pause due to the Covid-19 pandemic, domestic flights have taken off again with force. Last January, three new routes were opened from Rabat: Rabat-Oujda and Rabat-Nador with Air Arabia, and Rabat-Dakhla with Royal Air Maroc. The era when transit through the Casablanca hub to travel from one city to another was mandatory is over. As part of its development plan, Royal Air Maroc plans to eventually operate around fifty domestic routes. As for Ryanair, already very involved in connections with Europe, it has established itself as a leading player in the Moroccan sky. At the head of four bases in Morocco, the Irish low-cost airline has just settled in Dakhla, its thirteenth Moroccan airport, and now operates eleven domestic routes, including five from Tangier. A flight between Tangier and Marrakech costs a little less than 25 euros for a duration of about 1h20.

The train is also emerging as a serious alternative with the extension of the Kenitra-Marrakech High-Speed Line planned for 2030 in the perspective of the 2030 World Cup co-organized with Spain and Portugal. The journey between Tangier and Rabat will take one hour instead of 1h20, 1h30 for Casablanca instead of 2h10, and 3 hours for Marrakech instead of the current 5h15. A significant time saving when we know that it took nearly 8 hours to reach the ochre city before the inauguration of the high-speed line in 2018. The starting price of a Tangier-Marrakech ticket is less than 20 euros in semi-flex second class, a rate in line with the objective of the National Railway Office to position "the rail as the backbone of sustainable mobility in the kingdom" and to face the competition of air travel.

The future looks even more promising. We are talking about RER, especially in Casablanca. Not very glamorous seen from the Paris region but auspicious for future travel, given the rise of the automobile... and traffic jams.