Inside Saudi Arabia's $800 Billion Tourism Moonshot

Whatever your preconceived notion of Saudi Arabia as a travel destination is, it’s about to be get a major renovation. Imagine Sindalah, for example, a 7-star private-island resort with three ultra-luxe resorts, 38 high-end restaurants and multiple superyacht marinas. Or Qiddiya, a futuristic city of 600,000 people rising from the desert floor, dedicated to e-sports and gaming. How about Trojena, a space-age ski resort built above the high desert? Or The Red Sea, a vast waterscape of 50 luxury resorts and 8,000 hotel rooms spread across 22 islands in a Maldives-style archipelago—powered entirely by wind and solar energy? Also in the works is The Rig, a $5-billion adventure theme park built on an off-shore oil platform. In addition, Saudi Arabia is positioning itself as a cruise destination, having recently bought a $300-million ship. Across the Kingdom, new roads, airports, golf courses and cruise terminals are rising from the sand. The map is literally being redrawn in real time. Then there are all the new hotels, with their thousands of freshly built rooms. The world’s most iconic hospitality companies—Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, St. Regis, Fairmont, Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and InterContinental—are falling over themselves to jump into a construction pipeline that’s churning faster than anywhere else in the world. Any one of these projects might momentarily pierce the travel industry’s fleeting attention span. But together, what’s going on in Saudi Arabia simply cannot be ignored. Indeed, it can be often difficult to visualize the vastness of Saudi Arabia’s physical transformation. Some of the most notable ongoing projects—including Sindalah, the 7-star private island, and Trojena, the improbable desert ski resort—fall within NEOM, a $500-billion built-from-scratch region in northwest Saudi Arabia where the Kingdom is creating new cities, resorts and other developments. At 10,200 square miles and bounded by the Red Sea to the south and the Gulf of Aqaba to the west, it’s roughly the size of Albania. Bankrolled mainly by the Kingdom’s $700-billion Public Investment Fund (PIF), the idea for NEOM was born out of Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia’s grand plan to shake off its historic reliance on oil and diversify its economy. One the scheme’s pillars involves reinventing the country as a global tourism juggernaut. When first announced in 2016, the Kingdom’s tourism goals seemed fanciful: Attract 100 million foreign and domestic visitors to the country every year and grow tourism’s share of the economy from about 3% to 10%. Oh, and do it all in just 14 years. That aspiration seemed all the more preposterous given that, in 2016, Saudi Arabia had not yet opened its doors to international leisure travelers. At the time, travel to the Kingdom was almost entirely restricted to three types of people: expatriate workers, those with business visas, and religious pilgrims visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.


All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com
Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/s....uzannerowankelleher/


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