JEDDAH, 13 June 2005 — Investments in millions of riyals are being directed to the Kingdom’s potentially rich tourism industry.
As a result, tourist places and infrastructure are getting a lift-up. Many new hotels have opened and several projects are in the pipeline across the Kingdom, as also several resorts and tourist apartments.
All this is happening as a direct result of fresh investments that are coming in. “Investors who are directing their investments to real estate are also finding lucrative avenues in the tourist sector,” says a top executive of the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce & Industry.
“Tourism is generally considered to be a private sector activity and is known to be one of the most labor intensive industries in the world,” said JCCI Secretary-General Mohammed A. Al-Shareef.
Despite the Kingdom recognizing tourism as one of the most promising sectors, the all-round effort to promote domestic tourism had not yielded fruit for a long time. Despite the impact of 9/11, 2001 attacks in the United States, vacationers from this part of the world headed the West during their vacations, although in smaller numbers, taking with them more than $15 billion to spend.
In the last three years in particular, tourists from within the Kingdom have been spending their vacation in different parts of the country. According to a study, about 50 percent of the vacationers who used to travel overseas or other nearby Gulf and Arab countries now remain within the Kingdom, visiting its various cities and attractions.
This shows steady progress has been made in promoting domestic tourism. The importance of tourism led to the establishment of the Supreme Commission for Tourism (SCT) by a royal decree on April 16, 2000. The SCT is the first fully independent body to handle and develop all aspects of national tourism in Saudi Arabia, according to Prince Sultan ibn Salman who heads the SCT.
The strategic plan has included the SCT initiatives to implement tourist-related human resources development through the launch of the National Project for Tourism Human Resources Development (NPTHRD). The NPTHRD provides requirements for operations, education and training in accordance with the latest international standards.
The SCT was created as part of the effort to diversify Saudi Arabia’s economy, which is almost totally dependent on oil. Much of the country’s wealth is invested abroad, including an estimated $700 billion in the United States. “This huge investment is now being repatriated, although in trickles,” says a businessman and JCCI member Khaled Sulaiman.
Saudi Arabia’s ongoing development in the private sector, especially the booming real estate and tourist sectors, is indicative of the funds being repatriated by investors since 9/11. So there has been a rapid development of the tourist infrastructure like hotels, apartments, recreation centers, and beach resorts around Jeddah and also in the Eastern Province and the capital city of Riyadh.
Prince Sultan is confident and optimistic that tourism could be developed further to attract domestic tourists and thus could create more than 1.7 million jobs in the next 20 years. Many of the jobs could go to Saudis whose unemployment rate is estimated to exceed 30 percent.
Every year, Saudi Arabia draws more than 4 million Muslims from the world over who come to perform Haj, the annual pilgrimage, and year-round Umrah and also visit Madinah to pray at the Prophet’s Mosque.
Additionally, some one million residents of the Kingdom also perform Haj. Aside from these there is regular inflow of visitors for business and tourism, although they total around 6,000 a year. Most of the non-Muslim tourists come in tour groups organized by Saudi Arabian Airlines, the national carrier.
Saudi Arabia’s attractions are many and varied. Dating back more than a million years, many places in the Kingdom are ancient and historical and feature landscapes with spectacular and fascinating views. Sports themselves swimming, diving, parachuting and even bungee jumping. Modern shopping malls and traditional old markets are part of the Kingdom’s heritage and history. The Kingdom is also dotted with parks and amusement centers. These are some of the things that impress and attract domestic tourists. In Jeddah alone, thousands of visitors from other parts of the Kingdom can be seen every summer enjoying its beaches and recreation centers. Hotels and apartments are heavily booked and occupied during the summer months with apartments and chalets costing as high as SR300 per night per family. It is against this background that Prince Sultan is working on a project that will increase the anural number of visitors from 20.8 million to 44 million over the next 20 years. The current tourism industry is worth $10 billion annually and is estimated to more than double in 20 years. The plans include building an extra 50,000 hotel rooms over 10 years to add to the nearly 100,000 that already exist. The industry will also need 74,000 more apartments over the next decade.
