RIYADH: The quality control and licensing department team made a surprise visit to tourism facilities including accommodations across the Kingdom to ensure that quality services are rendered to visitors during the ongoing summer break.

Tourism festivals are currently on in different parts of the Kingdom, featuring a large number of events including youth, cultural, folklore, heritage, sports, and entertainment events and activities, and are witnessing huge turnouts.

These events are expected to boost tourism, highlighting the Kingdom’s cultural diversity as a country rich in tourism potential, in addition to introducing both citizens and expatriates to the Kingdom’s history and culture.

“The Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTNH) inspection teams recently made surprise visits to accommodation facilities in several provinces and were accompanied by a number of senior officials from SCTNH,” said Omar bin Abdul Aziz Al-Mubarak, acting director general of the licensing department, on Sunday.

Al-Mubarak said the purpose of the visits is to ensure that accommodation facility operators have already obtained operating licenses and classification certificates from SCTNH. “It further aims to detect the extent of provision of required services according to stipulated criteria to assure quality service,” he added.

He said that SCTNH works with public and private investors and tour operators in the sector as partners to develop the accommodation sector through engaging them in setting up the required criteria and making sure these criteria are adhered to after being approved.

SCTNH seeks to achieve fair competition and encourage investors in the sector through detecting violators and protecting the committed investors at the same time, he noted.

He pointed that such field visits covering different parts of the Kingdom are required to monitor service levels in the sector.

Many visitors returning from their trips have expressed favorable impressions of what they experienced during their tours in various parts of the Kingdom, saying it allowed them great opportunities to become acquainted with Kingdom’s sites and its vast areas filled with scenic beauty, especially in picturesque Abha and the mountain resort of Taif, where visitors throng on holidays.