The Guest at the Door: Public Opinion in Saudi Arabia on Tourism Development

How Locals See the Sector, Participate in Its Growth, and Shape Its Future

Research Article

Abstract

Saudi Arabia's tourism transformation is among the most dramatic in recent global travel history. In five years, the Kingdom moved from issuing no leisure visas to welcoming 116 million visitors in 2024. This article examines how Saudi residents experience, participate in, and evaluate this development. Drawing on academic research, survey data, and sociological theory, it finds that the dominant resident sentiment is one of active engagement and conditional support. Most Saudi citizens are not debating whether tourism should exist. They are participating in it as employees, entrepreneurs, domestic travellers, and cultural hosts. Where concerns exist, they reflect considered preferences about how the sector should develop, not opposition to its growth. The article argues that Saudi residents are active participants in the tourism transformation, motivated by economic opportunity, cultural pride, and the rediscovery of their own national heritage. Understanding resident sentiment is not merely an academic exercise. It is a prerequisite for sustainable sector development.

1. Introduction

Every country that opens itself to tourism faces a version of the same question from its own people: is this ours?

In Saudi Arabia's case, the available evidence suggests the answer is an emphatic yes — expressed not merely in words but in the behavior of millions of citizens who have embraced domestic tourism, entered the sector as entrepreneurs and employees, filled entertainment venues, rediscovered their own heritage, and taken visible pride in a Saudi Arabia that the world is finally beginning to see.

This is the central finding that the numbers support and that residents' voices confirm: most Saudi citizens are not debating whether tourism should exist. They are participating in it, shaping it, and in many cases driving it. The 86 million domestic tourist trips in 2024, the 45 percent rise in domestic flight bookings, the 15 million attendees at Riyadh Season, the 450,000 people at Soundstorm — these are not primarily tourists from abroad. They are Saudi citizens choosing to spend their leisure time and their money in the country they are rediscovering alongside the rest of the world.

This does not mean that public opinion is uniform or uncomplicated. It is neither. Saudi Arabia is a large, diverse, and deeply stratified society, and the tourism transformation touches its different communities differently. The article that follows examines the full texture of resident experience — its enthusiasm and its nuance, its participation and its preferences — with the aim of producing a picture that is as accurate as it is complete.

2. Theoretical Framework: Residents and Tourism Development

2.1 Social Exchange Theory and the Saudi Balance Sheet

The dominant theoretical framework in the academic literature on residents' attitudes toward tourism is social exchange theory — the idea that residents evaluate tourism development through a rational calculus of perceived costs and benefits. When the perceived benefits — jobs, improved infrastructure, economic activity, enhanced local services, civic pride — outweigh the perceived costs — crowding, cultural disruption, rising prices, loss of familiar spaces — residents tend to support further development. When costs dominate, resistance emerges.

Applied to Saudi Arabia, this framework generates a strongly positive balance sheet. The sector has created 250,000 new jobs already, with a target of 1 million. It contributes approximately 5 percent of GDP and is on a trajectory toward 10 percent. It has produced visible improvements in entertainment, infrastructure, and quality of life that the Kingdom's young majority have welcomed directly. Residents who engage with tourism development and with tourists are more likely to be positively affected across the dimensions of community life, image, and economy — and Saudi residents are engaging in large numbers.

What makes the Saudi case analytically interesting is not that the balance sheet is contested, but that it is so strongly positive — and yet, as with all rapid transformations, the speed of change has compressed the adjustment period in ways that have sharpened both enthusiasm and the desire for careful stewardship of how the sector develops.

2.2 From Anxiety Theory to Active Participation

Earlier academic literature on Saudi residents' attitudes toward tourism — much of it produced in the period immediately after 2019, when the tourism opening was new and its implications uncertain — drew on anxiety and uncertainty management theory to explore how residents were navigating intercultural encounters.

What that research found, however, was largely reassuring: Saudi residents' concerns were not primarily about encountering foreign visitors, but about ensuring that the social changes accompanying tourism development reflected Saudi values and priorities. More importantly, the research confirmed that direct contact with visitors tends to reduce anxiety and increase social openness — a finding that is consistent with the direction of the broader transformation. As the tourism sector has matured from its earliest phase, and as direct encounters between Saudi residents and visitors have multiplied, the apprehension of the initial period has given way, in most documented accounts, to growing comfort and pride.

This trajectory is important. It suggests that the residents' relationship to tourism is not static but evolving — and that the direction of evolution, driven by the accumulation of positive experience, is toward greater engagement and support.

2.3 Where Saudi Arabia Sits on the Resident Sentiment Spectrum

Sociologist Doxey's Irridex model maps the lifecycle of resident attitudes toward tourism across four stages: euphoria, apathy, irritation, and antagonism. Saudi Arabia's current positioning — given the evidence of high domestic participation, continued expansion of the entertainment sector, rising heritage tourism visits, and the strongly positive economic indicators — is clearly in the euphoric-to-engaged range. Unlike many mature tourism destinations that have entered irritation or antagonism after decades of unmanaged growth, Saudi Arabia is still in the early, formative phase of its tourism identity — a phase characterized by discovery, pride, and the kind of active civic investment in the sector that is most visible in the behavior of young Saudis and Saudi women.

3. Residents as Active Participants: The Evidence of Engagement

3.1 The Domestic Tourism Revolution

The single most powerful piece of evidence for resident support of tourism development in Saudi Arabia is the behavior of Saudi citizens themselves. Historically, many Saudis traveled abroad for leisure — to Europe, Southeast Asia, or other Arab countries — because domestic entertainment and tourism options were limited. Vision 2030 has reversed this pattern by creating attractions, experiences, and infrastructure that make staying home not merely acceptable but genuinely compelling.

The transformation is measurable in every relevant metric. Government data shows 86.2 million domestic tourist trips in 2024, a 5 percent increase over the prior year. Domestic flight bookings rose by 45 percent year-on-year in 2024, driven by expanding tourism offerings and greater connectivity through low-cost carriers. Family and group travel bookings surged over 70 percent in key segments. Domestic spending contributed SR 284 billion to the economy, a figure that represents not tourism by foreign visitors to Saudi Arabia but Saudi citizens investing in their own country's leisure economy.

These are not the numbers of a population that is passive about tourism. They are the numbers of a population that is, in very large proportions, choosing to participate.

3.2 The Heritage Rediscovery: Pride in What Was Always There

One of the most significant and emotionally resonant dimensions of the tourism transformation is the domestic rediscovery of Saudi Arabia's own heritage. AlUla — whose ancient Nabataean tombs and spectacular rock landscapes were known primarily to archaeologists and specialists a decade ago — has become a destination that young Saudis are discovering with genuine excitement. More than 1,100 new heritage sites were added to the National Register of Architectural Heritage in 2024 alone, bringing the total to 3,646. Heritage tourism attracted 6.5 million visitors to cultural sites in 2024, with Diriyah, AlUla, and Historic Jeddah ranking among the most visited.

The Ministry of Heritage has described this as "a broader societal shift in awareness around the value of national heritage" — a phrase that captures a genuine cultural development: Saudi citizens are encountering their own country's extraordinary depth with the fresh eyes of discovery. Diriyah, the birthplace of the Saudi state, is being restored and developed not merely as a product for international tourists but as a space that invites Saudis to experience their own founding narrative as a living, accessible reality. Historic Jeddah's Al-Balad district — with its distinctive coral architecture and layered Red Sea mercantile history — is drawing Saudi visitors who are, for many, experiencing their own city's heritage for the first time.

This is tourism as cultural preservation, not cultural disruption. The most visited and celebrated tourism destinations in the Kingdom are precisely those that are rooted most deeply in Saudi history and identity. The international visitor who comes to AlUla validates what Saudi citizens already know: that their country has a cultural inheritance of exceptional depth and beauty, worth sharing with the world.

3.3 Tourism as Cultural Celebration: The Heritage Sector's Significance

The cultural heritage dimension of Saudi tourism deserves particular emphasis because it runs directly counter to a framing that positions tourism development as primarily a force of cultural disruption. Saudi Arabia's most successful tourism initiatives — AlUla, Diriyah Gate, Historic Jeddah, the restoration of Najdi architectural heritage across the Kingdom — are explicitly rooted in the preservation, celebration, and sharing of Saudi cultural identity.

The Saudi Arabia heritage tourism market was valued at USD 5.1 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 8.5 billion by 2033 — a growth trajectory powered primarily by domestic interest and the genuine enthusiasm of Saudi citizens for engaging with their own heritage in new ways. Sixteen cultural elements have been registered on UNESCO's Representative List of the World's Intangible Cultural Heritage. The investment in heritage site documentation, restoration, and interpretation represents a commitment not merely to attracting foreign visitors but to making Saudi Arabia's cultural inheritance visible and accessible to its own people.

For many Saudi residents, the tourism transformation is experienced primarily through this heritage lens. It is not a foreign imposition but a national act of cultural confidence — the decision to share with the world something that Saudis themselves have always known to be extraordinary.

3.4 Youth Enthusiasm and the Entertainment Dimension

Saudi Arabia's under-35 population — which constitutes the majority of the Kingdom's citizens — has been, broadly, the most enthusiastic constituency for tourism development. This is the generation that grew up without cinemas, without mixed-gender entertainment venues, without the kinds of leisure infrastructure that young people in comparable economies take for granted. The rapid expansion of entertainment — cinemas, theme parks, music festivals, sporting events, restaurants, and cultural spaces — has been experienced by this generation not as a loss of familiar culture but as the arrival of things they had wanted for years.

The participation rates speak directly. A YouGov survey in March 2024 found that one in five Saudi residents cites visiting theme parks as one of their favourite leisure activities. Riyadh Season's 15-million-visitor attendance in 2024 was driven substantially by Saudi citizens. Soundstorm attracted 450,000 attendees, the majority residents rather than tourists. The number of cinemas across the Kingdom has grown to over 70, with Saudi audiences filling them.

For this generation, the tourism and entertainment development is not primarily about foreigners arriving. It is about their own country finally offering the experiences that they had previously left the Kingdom to find.

3.5 Women as Tourism Sector Leaders

Saudi women's relationship to tourism development represents perhaps the clearest example of residents as active participants rather than passive observers. Women now represent nearly half of all employees in the tourism sector, following a rapid increase in hiring since 2018 — a transformation from a situation in which female participation in service-sector employment was structurally limited. Tourism has been a principal vehicle for the gender dimension of Vision 2030 in ways that are concrete and personally meaningful to hundreds of thousands of Saudi women and their families.

Women's labor force participation has risen sharply, exceeding the initial Vision 2030 target of 30 percent and reaching the mid-30 percent range in recent years. Within this broader shift, tourism and hospitality have emerged as emblematic arenas of gendered transformation. Research on gender and tourism motivations in Saudi Arabia confirms that women show strong engagement in culturally embedded, family-oriented, and heritage-focused tourism practices — patterns that reflect not merely economic participation but genuine personal investment in the sector as a space for social and professional expression.

The growth of female tourism entrepreneurship — in tour guiding, hospitality management, culinary tourism, and cultural interpretation — is one of the sector's least-reported but most significant stories. It represents residents not merely supporting tourism development from the outside but building it from within.

4. The Nuances of Support: What Residents Want from Tourism Development

4.1 Conditional Support, Not Opposition

The most important clarification that the evidence supports is this: where Saudi residents express concerns about tourism development, those concerns are almost universally the concerns of engaged stakeholders who want the sector to develop well — not of opponents who want it to stop. The dominant posture of Saudi public opinion toward tourism is one of conditional support: pride in what the country is offering the world, combined with clear preferences about how the development should proceed.

Academic research applying the mixed perceptions framework to Saudi residents generated a nuanced finding: the study identified four themes — mixed perception, support, resistance to cultural change, and support for cultural preservation — but crucially, resistance to cultural change was specifically about domestic entertainment norms, not about tourism itself, and was far outweighed by the general support for the sector's development. The same research confirmed that increased intercultural contact through tourism enhances social acceptance of difference and benefits society broadly.

The distinction between theoretical concerns in the academic literature and lived public sentiment is important to draw clearly. Much of the anxiety literature in Saudi tourism studies was produced in the 2017–2021 period, when the transformation was at its most uncertain and the outcomes most unpredictable. The evidence from 2022 onward — domestic tourism growth, heritage site attendance, entertainment participation, workforce entry — points to a public that has moved substantially toward active engagement.

4.2 Cultural Preservation as a Shared Goal, Not a Tension

One finding from the research literature deserves particular emphasis because it reframes what might superficially appear to be a tension between tourism development and cultural identity. Saudi residents' most consistent desire regarding tourism development is not to limit it but to ensure it serves cultural preservation. The most popular and celebrated tourism destinations in the Kingdom — AlUla, Diriyah, Historic Jeddah, the heritage villages of Asir, the ancient sites of Tabuk — are precisely the places where Saudi cultural identity is most visible and most actively presented.

For residents, the ideal tourism development is one in which the country's Islamic heritage, deep hospitality traditions, extraordinary historical landscape, and living cultural practices are not commodified as inert museum pieces but shared as the genuinely alive culture that they are. This desire — articulated clearly in qualitative research — is not in tension with the sector's development goals. It is aligned with them. The Kingdom's strategic emphasis on heritage and cultural tourism, reflected in the UNESCO registrations, the restoration investments, and the curatorial philosophy of destinations like AlUla, reflects a national decision that tourism and cultural authenticity are reinforcing rather than competing.

4.3 The Economic Justice Dimension

Saudi residents' most practically grounded concern about tourism development is distributional: they want its benefits to reach local communities, not merely large developers and international chains. The creation of small and family-owned businesses in tourism destinations — documented in government reports as a priority and an outcome of the sector's growth — directly addresses this concern. In AlUla, local families have entered the tourism economy as guides, hospitality providers, and cultural interpreters. In Historic Jeddah, heritage restoration has generated local craft economies alongside global hotel brands. In Diriyah, the development model explicitly integrates local identity into the visitor experience.

The evidence suggests that this distributional dimension of tourism development is being actively managed by policymakers. The Tourism Development Fund's mandate to support private sector development with a particular emphasis on SMEs and local enterprises reflects an understanding that the social contract of tourism requires broad-based benefit sharing. When residents see tourism creating opportunities for people like them — not merely for multinational corporations — their support deepens and their investment in the sector's success becomes personal.

4.4 Geographic and Generational Variation

Public opinion on tourism is not uniform across Saudi Arabia's diverse geography, and acknowledging this variation produces a more accurate picture than any single characterization. Jeddah — a port city with a long history of commercial and cultural encounter — has been receptive to tourism development and international visitors, building on cosmopolitan norms that predate Vision 2030. Riyadh, as the capital and primary site of the transformation's most visible investments, is a city whose residents span the full enthusiasm spectrum, with youth and women among the most engaged.

Smaller cities and rural communities experience tourism development differently — often encountering it first through heritage site investment that directly elevates their local identity and the international recognition of landscapes they have lived within all their lives. Residents of AlUla, for instance, are not primarily anxious about the transformation of their home into a global cultural destination. Many are actively participating in it, serving as guides, storytellers, and hospitality providers for visitors who have traveled from across the world specifically to experience what is, in AlUla residents' daily reality, simply home.

The generational pattern is strongly positive: younger Saudis are the sector's most enthusiastic domestic participants, and their engagement as employees, entrepreneurs, and consumers is the foundation on which the sector's long-term sustainability rests.

5. Looking Forward: Residents as the Sector's Architects

5.1 The Evidence of Lived Positive Outcomes

Beyond the macroeconomic data and attendance statistics, the clearest evidence of resident support for tourism development is the accumulation of lived positive outcomes that have accrued to Saudi citizens since the sector's expansion began. The reduction in youth unemployment as arts and hospitality sectors expanded. The professional opportunities for women in roles that simply did not exist a decade ago. The domestic tourism infrastructure that has made the Kingdom's extraordinary landscapes accessible to its own citizens. The cultural pride generated by UNESCO recognition of Saudi heritage. The entrepreneurial opportunities created by the growth of tourism SMEs in destinations like AlUla, Diriyah, and Historic Jeddah.

These outcomes are not abstract. They are the daily reality of a population that is, on the available evidence, experiencing tourism development as a net positive — as a transformation that has expanded their options, enriched their leisure lives, elevated their country's international standing, and created pathways to economic participation that the previous generation did not have.

5.2 The Most Likely Future: Deepening Engagement

The trajectory of Saudi resident sentiment toward tourism development, read across the available evidence, points toward deepening rather than narrowing engagement. As domestic tourism infrastructure matures, as the heritage sector develops its interpretive depth, as more Saudi citizens enter the workforce through tourism-related employment, and as the positive experiences of millions of domestic tourists accumulate into a shared national narrative about the country's own richness, the social foundation of the sector's growth will continue to strengthen.

The most significant risk to that trajectory is not public opposition but the potential for the sector's benefits to concentrate in ways that leave some communities feeling bypassed. Managing this risk — through the Tourism Development Fund's SME support, through policies that distribute economic benefit across regions, and through the deliberate integration of local identity into tourism product development — is the primary governance challenge that will determine whether resident support remains a foundation or becomes a constraint.

6. Conclusion: A Country Discovering Itself

The opening of Saudi Arabia to tourism is, at its deepest, an act of national self-recognition — a decision by a country and its citizens to share what they know about themselves with the rest of the world.

The dominant finding of this article is that Saudi residents are not bystanders to that process. They are its most important drivers. The 86 million domestic tourist trips, the heritage sites visited and shared, the restaurants opened and staffed, the guides trained and deployed, the concerts attended and celebrated — these are the acts of a population that has made a collective, active bet on the transformation of their country into a destination that reflects their own culture, pride, and ambition.

Where questions and preferences exist — about the pace of development, the distribution of benefits, the preservation of cultural authenticity — they are the questions of invested stakeholders, not reluctant participants. The Saudi resident who wants AlUla to develop in a way that honors its extraordinary heritage is not opposing tourism; they are advocating for the best version of it. The Saudi woman entering the hospitality workforce is not merely accepting change; she is making change, one professional role at a time.

The most enduring finding of the research literature on tourism and host communities is that the best predictor of sector sustainability is not visitor numbers but resident pride. Saudi Arabia's tourism transformation, built as it is on the country's own cultural inheritance, its genuine hospitality traditions, and the active participation of its citizens as both workers and travelers, has the conditions for that pride in generous supply.

The guest is at the door. And the hosts, on the available evidence, are welcoming.

References and Further Reading

• Frontiers in Sociology. "Cultural Representation, Soft Power, and Tourism Futures in Vision 2030: Saudi Arabia's Path Toward the 2034 FIFA World Cup." frontiersin.org, 2026.
• University of Tennessee. "Mixed Perceptions of Tourism Development in Saudi Arabia." Doctoral Dissertation, 2020. trace.tennessee.edu.
• SAGE Journals. "Socio-Cultural Drivers of Saudi Tourists' Outbound Destination Decisions." Madkhali et al., 2024.
• SAGE Journals. "Gender and Tourism Motivations in Saudi Arabia." Alkohaiz et al., 2025.
• Oxford Business Group. "Rising Tourism Numbers Support Saudi Arabia's Diversification." Saudi Arabia Report 2024.
• Oxford Business Group. "Increased Visitor Demand Supports Tourism Growth in Saudi Arabia." Saudi Arabia Report 2025.
• AGSI. "Visit Saudi: The Impact of Tourism on the Saudi Economy." agsi.org, May 2025.
• Gulf News. "Heritage Tourism Surges in Saudi Arabia Drawing 6.5 Million Visitors in 2024." gulfnews.com.
• Travel and Tour World. "Saudi Arabia's Domestic Tourism Soars During Eid Al-Fitr." travelandtourworld.com, March 2025.
• SCIEDU Press. "Language, Identity, and Tourism in Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030." 2025.
• World Bank. "The Tourism Impact: Diversifying Saudi Arabia's Economy and Creating Jobs Through Culture." blogs.worldbank.org, October 2025.
• YouGov. "Eastern Countries Generally Favour Tourism to Saudi Arabia More Than Western Countries." yougov.com, February 2025.
• OECD. "Saudi Arabia: OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2024." oecd.org.
• Grand View Research. "Saudi Arabia Heritage Tourism Market Report." grandviewresearch.com, 2024.
• Preprints.org. "Tourism Development and Management in Saudi Arabia." January 2025.
• Doxey, G.V. "A Causation Theory of Visitor-Resident Irritants: Methodology and Research Inferences." Proceedings of the Travel Research Association, 1975.
• Ap, J. "Residents' Perceptions on Tourism Impacts." Annals of Tourism Research, 19(4), 665–690. 1992.

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