The tourism industry of Saudi Arabia is poised to create almost 1.8 million jobs by 2020. According to the annual report of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) for 2012-2013, the
Saudi tourism sector will offer around 1.3 million jobs in 2015 itself.
The report said the tourism sector had created job opportunities for the citizens where, according to an SCTA estimate, the number of direct jobs in the tourism sector in 2012 amounted to about 709,000, an increase of 5.9 percent from the previous year with 670,000 jobs, distributed across the tourism sub-sectors.
The report elaborated that the share of domestic tourism in the country’s GDP in 2012 increased by 6.8 percent compared to 2011 to reach SR70.2 billion as the percentage of the nonoil sector’s contribution to the GDP touched slightly higher with an “added-value” from 7.3 percent to 7.4 percent during 2012.
Although the report indicated a decrease of 8.2 percent on spending by domestic tourists “excluding expenses on international transport” in 2012 at SR32.6 billion compared to SR 35.5 billion in 2011, it however, showed that the volume of inbound tourism spending in 2012 rose by 16.8 percent to SR57.2 billion, compared to about SR49 billion in the previous year.
The report said that accommodation facilities ranked first for incoming tourists’ spending at SR19.7 billion, up by 34.5 percent in 2012, while shopping came second at about SR 15.5 billion representing 27 percent of the total expenditure for the same year.
The 49th SAMA report also refers to the SCTA’s efforts in the development of the hotel sector, as the number of hotels operating in the Kingdom by the end of 2012 reached 1,098 hotels of different grades, and the number of furnished residential units in the Kingdom by the end of 2012 reached about 1,971, distributed across various cities in the Kingdom.
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