How Saudi Sees Luxury: Just '20% Will Be in 4- And 5-Star Hotels’
Photo Credit: A shot of Hegra in AlUla, Saudi Arabia. Unsplash / Hatem Boukhit
Skift Take
Saudi Arabia says its "real business" will come from mass-market travel, not ultra-luxury stays.
Skift reported recently that Saudi’s Vision 2030 is too expensive for tourists: If it eventually wants 70 million international visitors, it’s going to need more supply of hotels that don’t cost thousands of dollars a day.
The Saudi Tourism Authority was quick to acknowledge the issue: The STA pointed to developments beyond the most high-profile projects and said it needs to do a better job communicating.
“If you look at The Red Sea, Neom, altogether even, by 2030, they won’t even be 1% [of hotel capacity],” said the agency’s CEO, Fahd Hamidaddin, during the Arabian Travel Market (ATM) trade show in Dubai.
“It’s a fault of our media, our share of voice is going mostly to those flagship 1% projects. I have to say, Skift’s article was a wake-up call. It is a perception people have, and you rightly captured it.”
But according to Knight Frank, around 82% of upcoming rooms in Saudi are in the luxury and upscale categories.
Of the 320,000 planned new rooms for Saudi by 2030, as many as
