The Tourism Shift in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected international tourism, and KSA tourism in particular. This paper aims to examine the impact of the pandemic on the tourism industry of Saudi Arabia and the changes it brought to those consumers’ preferences and industries. In-depth face-to-face interviews have been conducted with several industry players alongside the development of structured questionnaires to establish new knowledge about the difficulties and possibilities in the industry. As the kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been solely dependent on oil resources for its major income source, the kingdom has been coming up with measures like Vision 2030 in which there has been an emphasis on the growth of the tourism industry. In particular, before the impact of COVID-19, the sector was one of the major sources of the country’s income and a significant employer of the population; in fact, it contributed about 7% to the gross domestic product of the nation. Nevertheless, the advent of COVID-19 has called for change and negatively impacted the prospects of the industry through closure of business operations, loss of sales, and employment instabilities within the tourism industry. Another significant transformation that was revealed during the COVID transformation was the transition in the focus of customer demand from global to local tourism. This shift was caused by limitations in travel across countries as well as increased awareness of health needs, which led consumers to opt for local attractions. At the same time, the organizations that worked in the sphere of tourism started introducing new digital tools to meet the demand and survive during multiple lockdowns. Government actions and measures were also critical to industrialists in terms of reshaping their strategies and getting new rules and funds since clear working directions and financial incentives helped to bring consumers back and open borders for foreign visitors. Interest in health and safety concerns led to the incorporation of strict measures in KSA and the entire region, essential to serving tourist clients. These measures were such as contactless payment, increased cleanliness of transit facilities and vehicles, and physical distancing. And with regional Tourism consumption increasing, there is a move towards historical & culturalized Tourism attractions & destinations. However, the extant literature also reveals some of the certain lemonade outcomes that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the field of tourism: 1) there were opportunities for the growth of the industry as a whole and for everyone to search for better ways of working. New trends for the development of the tourist industry appeared such as adventure tourism and practicing environmentally friendly policies, as well as the concept of sustainable tourism. However, certain weaknesses of the study need to be highlighted; they were as follows: There were few participants in the study; the study used self-reported measures, which can often bring in some level of bias. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the power and promises of Saudi Arabia tourism through behavioral changes, organizational adaptation and policy-making of the Government. As seen from everyday unfolding events the threat has been significant but the best part is that the industry has the chance to reshape it, reinvent itself and come out even stronger in the post-COVID era. Future research may build on these trends and assess if and how Saudi Arabia's tourism needs to change and adapt for greater sustainability and resilience in the long term.