In February, Ahmed Al-Khateeb, Saudi Arabia's Minister of Tourism, announced that the Kingdom had welcomed 27 million foreign visitor arrivals in 2023, an increase of 156% on the year 2019, pre-COVID.
Saudi Arabia has extremely ambitious plans for its tourism sector, and is targeting 70 million international visitor arrivals by the year 2030.
To accommodate those travellers, some 280,000 hotel rooms are already available in the country and the goal is to have 550,000 by 2030.
Anyone who reads Travel News Asia on a daily base will have no doubt that they can achieve those numbers, as rarely a week goes by where at least one hotel company does not sign one or multiple new hotels in the country.
Saudi Arabia is not just building to boost numbers, however, it is also learning from other countries and wants to avoid mistakes made and ensure that quality in construction and services is maintained. To do that, new tourism regulations have been introduced and inspection campaigns are ongoing to ensure compliance. The government says it closed more than 250 hotels in 2023 alone.
Saudi Arabia will need much more than just hotel rooms to achieve its goals, it will also need to improve its air connectivity and even has an Air Connectivity Programme (ACP) that addresses this precise need.
To learn more about Saudi Arabia's Air Connectivity Programme (ACP), Steven Howard of Travel News Asia sat down with Rashed Alshammari, Vice President Commercial, at Routes Asia 2024 in Langkawi, Malaysia.
In this interview, filmed on 27 February 2024, Steven asks about Saudi Arabia's post-COVID recovery, what challenges the Kingdom faces in trying to boost its air connectivity and which markets it is targeting the most.
We discuss which airports around the world the ACP programme monitors and learns from, how the ACP will grow in the future and what needs to be done for Saudi Arabia to achieve its ambitious goals.
All that and much, much more in the interview.
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10 сен 2024
