Berita Arab Saudi Dan Sekitarnya

Saudi Arabia and Arsenale Group, developer of Italy’s La Dolce Vita Orient Express project, have shared designs for the Middle East’s first luxury train cruise as the country plans investment of $800 billion to expand its fledgling tourism industry.

While the desert kingdom is heavily focused on developing its more up-market tourism industry to attract global and regional attention and build a brand, it is also expected to expand middle-income facilities, especially in the run-up to the World Expo and the Fifa World Cup, which it is hosting in 2030 and 2034 respectively.

For now, however, of the 320,000 hotel rooms Saudi Arabia wants developed by 2030, two thirds are classified as “upscale” or “luxury” by consultant Knight Frank.

“Having these top tier brands is giving them what they want,” says Turab Saleem, a tourism consultant and partner at Knight Frank.

“It’s a marketing machine. This noise is giving them a demand, which is required at this stage, because people globally were not even aware of the Saudi tourism sector.”

Meanwhile, Arsenale’s so-called Dream of the Desert, a 14-carriage, luxury suite art deco train designed by the celebrity architect Aline Asmar d’Amman, aims to move guests along a 1,300 kilometre track from the Saudi capital, Riyadh, to Al Qurayyat, near the border with Jordan.

Arsenale Group

The train will start operating next year in partnership with the state-owned Saudi Arabia Railways, Arsenale has said.

Ticket prices have not yet been announced, but one-way tickets from Rome to Palermo on Dream of the Desert’s sister train project, Arsenale’s La Dolce Vita Orient Express, start at €9,840 ($10,200) per person. La Dolce Vita is due to begin operations later this year.

Saudi Arabia, the largest Arab economy, only began offering tourist visas in 2019. Last year, it welcomed 30 million international visitors, the most of any country in the region. Many of these, however, were Muslim pilgrims visiting the religious sites in Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia’s western region.

Travel experts say that Saudi Arabia will eventually have to turn to a broader, more middle-income tourist market once its pitch as an exclusive travel destination runs its course.

“It’s one of the very few destinations which has more demand than the supply,” says Knight Frank’s Saleem, who expects visitor numbers to grow as more capacity comes online. “This is very rare.”

Saudi Arabia is increasing hotel capacity at an average of about 53,000 keys per year, slightly more than the total number of hotel rooms in Denmark.

It is also investing in air-transport capacity as it seeks to more than double the number of passengers to 300 million by 2030. However, achieving this target is likely to have been pushed out because of the delayed start of Riyadh Air.

While religious tourism remains the single biggest source of international visitors, the number of leisure tourists is increasing each year. The government is investing in high-spend cultural tourism sites, including the oasis city of AlUla in the northwest of the country, as well as futuristic resorts such as Neom and the Trojena ski resort.

The Royal Commission for AlUla

As well as hosting the World Expo in 2030 and the World Cup in 2034, Saudi Arabia has expressed an interest in the 2036 Olympics.

Signing up for global events that regularly attract millions of visitors implies a shift in Saudi Arabia towards catering for middle-income tourists. Travel consultants say the shift is necessary to keep tourists coming in big numbers.

Until fairly recently, Dubai, too, was seen as an exclusively up-market destination. When the city hosted the World Expo from 2021 to 2022, it welcomed more than 24 million visitors, encouraging the local tourism industry to adapt.

Taimur Khan, head of research for Middle East and Africa at the consultancy JLL, says: “Prior to that, we had a market which was pretty highly segmented towards your four- or five-star products. You didn’t have so many three-star products.”

Since then, Dubai’s market for middle-income travellers has matured. Khan expects Saudi Arabia to follow along those lines. “You’ll see the development of the market as a result [of Expo 2030] because that’s a lot of visitations in a pretty short span of time,” he says. “We’re going to start seeing a significant increase in higher volume brands.”