Saudi Arabia adds more than 1,000 hospitality establishments in a year

Published: 2026-07-06T07:50:30.000Z

Saudi Arabia's hospitality boom is no longer a projection on a slide, it is showing up in the official count. Licensed tourism establishments reached 5,937 by the fourth quarter of 2025, up from 4,425 a year earlier, a jump of 34.2 per cent and more than 1,500 new facilities.

Saudi Arabia's hospitality boom is no longer a projection on a slide, it is showing up in the official count. Figures from the General Authority for Statistics show the number of licensed tourism establishments in the Kingdom reached 5,937 by the fourth quarter of 2025, up from 4,425 a year earlier, a jump of 34.2 per cent. That works out at more than 1,500 new hospitality facilities added in a single year, comfortably clearing the thousand mark and underlining just how quickly the sector is being built out under Vision 2030. The growth is spread fairly evenly across formats. Serviced apartments and similar accommodation made up 3,090 of the total, while hotels accounted for 2,847, a balance that reflects the country's twin needs of housing long-staying corporate and construction workers alongside a fast-growing flow of leisure and religious visitors. The workforce behind all this has expanded too, with employment in tourism activities reaching around 1.03 million people, up 6.6 per cent year on year. Saudi nationals held roughly a quarter of those jobs, a figure the government is keen to push higher as it leans on the sector to create work for young people and women. The wider numbers explain the rush. Saudi Arabia logged a record of nearly 116 million tourist trips in 2024, having already blown past its original target of 100 million, and it has since raised its ambition to 150 million visitors a year by 2030. Tourism contributed more than 444 billion riyals to the economy in 2024, around 11.5 per cent of GDP, and the development pipeline is enormous, with something like 362,000 new hotel rooms planned by 2030 as part of a hospitality transformation valued at roughly 110 billion dollars. Giga-projects such as The Red Sea and Amaala are turning glossy renderings into operational resorts, and global chains from Hilton to IHG and Wyndham are scrambling to plant flags before the best sites are gone. The regional contest gives the surge its edge. For years Dubai set the pace for Gulf hospitality, and it remains formidable, but Saudi Arabia is now mounting the most aggressive expansion in the Middle East and reshaping where investors and operators focus their attention. The competition is drawing in regional heavyweights like Rotana and Jumeirah alongside the big Western brands, all chasing a market that visa liberalization and easier access have thrown wide open. Religious tourism to Makkah and Madinah still supplies a dependable base of demand, but the striking shift is that non-religious travelers now make up the majority of international arrivals, a change that is nudging the whole pipeline towards leisure resorts and higher-end stays and putting the Kingdom in direct rivalry with its Gulf neighbors for the same global spend.