Saudi Arabia's national airline to introduce gender segregation after a string of complaints

[RationalMan]

30. This could be interesting for their membership in the Skyteam Alliance

There are certain reciprocal benefits that alliance members give to their mutual passengers. So what happens when someone purchases a ticket on Delta from Detroit to Paris and connects to Saudi Airlines on to Jeddah in business class. That passenger is not going to pay a business class fare and not be able to select their seat from Paris to Jeddah. So will they allow them to reserve the seat but at the gate in Paris they will discover that they have too many men or women to be able to segregate and they are going to downgrade them to economy or deny them boarding?

This is why any form of fundamentalist religion creates havoc. Saudi joined the alliance because they thought it would help them in response to the successes of other Gulf nation airlines such as Emirates, Ethiad, Qatar, etc. The alliance would likely have preferred one of those carriers to Saudi but Saudi was what was available.

This could become very interesting if the alliance members deem Saudi to now not meet their membership criteria or that membership is actually more of a problem than a help.