For more than two decades, Omar Elfeky’s Islamic travel agency in a Manhattan office tower did a brisk business booking flights and hotel rooms for American Muslims going on pilgrimages to Mecca.
Although Saudi Arabia had closed its borders early in the pandemic, business had picked up in recent months. But in June, just weeks before the hajj — the holier of two pilgrimages — was set to commence, the travel agency faced a new challenge: The Saudi government, which typically had a laissez-faire attitude toward Western pilgrims, tightened the rules.
Officials there introduced a new web portal that would dole out pilgrimage slots via lottery. The decision upended travel plans and cut out travel agents altogether.


Mr. Elfeky said the portal, which requires pilgrims to make their bookings directly through the Saudi government, spelled the end for his company, Al Eman USA. “It took us totally out of business,” he said.


“The last 25 years I have made my living from the hajj. I have five employees. The hajj is the biggest trip, and we all make our living from it,” he said. “What am I going to do?”
The hajj, which concludes Tuesday, includes Mecca and nearby holy sites. Muslims are required to complete it once in their lives if they are in good health and have the money to make the trip. It is also a major source of political and religious legitimacy for the Saudi government, which in 2019 allowed more than 1.8 million pilgrims into the country, according to the most recently available government data.
Over the centuries, a lucrative travel industry has grown up around the hajj and a similar pilgrimage that takes place throughout the year called umrah — an industry that stretches from luxury hotels in Mecca to storefront travel agencies in Queens.
In announcing the new lottery system, the country’s Ministry of Hajj and Umrah said its goal was “to develop the digital experience for pilgrims” and “facilitate direct procedures and reduce costs at competitive prices.”


It is unclear how much money the new system might save pilgrims, and travel agents view the rules change as a cash grab by Saudi officials.


“Saudi Arabia makes a lot of money off this one way or another,” Mr. Elfeky said.
Saudi Arabia applies quotas to the number of pilgrims it allows each year from Muslim countries, but those from Europe, the Americas and Australia have not faced restrictions in the past. In 2018, the United States State Department estimated that 20,000 Americans went on hajj, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on travel packages that frequently cost more than $10,000 per person.
It was easy for large groups to travel together, like a group of more than 100 students from New York University who went on hajj in 2019 under the leadership of Khalid Latif, the executive director of the Islamic Center at New York University.
Going on hajj with a group allows people to travel with religious leaders they trust, who speak their language and know their culture, and who can help them understand and perform rituals, Mr. Latif said.
“I was trying to take as many people as possible who wanted to go, just so the experience was one that allowed for them to go with people that they knew, a larger kind of communal experience,” he said.
Under the new system, each participant in a group trip like the one organized by Mr. Latif would have to win the lottery. The lottery results this year were announced, in some cases, just days before the hajj was set to begin.
After the rule change was announced last month, Mr. Latif, who was planning to lead another group this year that included people who canceled their trips in 2020 and 2021, advised participants to ask for refunds and delay their trips to a less “chaotic” year, he said. Some had saved money their whole lives.


Ismeil Chaiep, 65, the owner of El Medina Travel in Astoria, Queens, said the rule change has driven him out of business too. He gave refunds to 350 customers, including some who paid their deposits in 2020 and were hoping to finally make the trip this year.


“We could not handle it, the rent and the pay,” said Mr. Chaiep, who had 10 employees. “It was so hard to close. Now I do some work from home, but nobody can make any money now.”
Hajj packages with the travel agencies were not cheap.
Mr. Chaiep said some of the deposits he refunded were as high as $25,000. Mr. Elfeky said the average cost of an all-inclusive hajj package at his agency was $16,000.
At Friday prayers at Masjid El-Ber mosque in Astoria, a hub of the Bangladeshi community, stories abound of cousins and friends-of-friends whose hajj plans were scrambled at the last minute by the new rules.
But few people were willing to criticize the Saudi government, out of fear that they could be barred from entering the country in the future.
And few people at the mosque expressed much sympathy for the travel agencies. When the Prophet Muhammad instructed Muslims to go on hajj, he never said anything about travel agents, mused Emad Chowdhury, 68.


“I don’t feel sorry for those people because they take a lot of money from us — this charge and that charge, for nothing,” Mr. Chowdhury said. “Hajj should be simple.”


Mr. Chowdhury said his wife went on hajj a few years ago after she purchased a $14,000 package from Dar El Salam Travel, an Islamic travel agency in Manhattan. They saved all their lives for the trip, but in the end, they only had enough money for one person to go. He stayed behind because the $8,000 left in their savings wasn’t enough to buy a second package.
“I think this is a good thing for us, for pilgrims,” he said. “People maybe are confused now but this will be better.”
Asmaa al-Omar contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

Source: New York Times

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