Passing through pristine islands and turquoise lagoons, the first cruise ship offering tours of Saudi Arabia has a dual purpose: to reactivate tourism despite the fears of coronaviruses and to provide megaprojects that challenge planned austerity along the Red Sea.
In August, the Silver Spirit cruise began offering tours along the unspoilt Red Sea coast, to which the oil state aspires, making it a global access point for tourism and investment as a component of a plan to reduce dependence on oil revenues.
Signed through a company owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, the luxury shipment provides a window into multimillion-dollar “big projects” that the kingdom is carrying out despite a severe economic downturn.
“We are bringing the Red Sea to the world,” Tourism Minister Ahmed al-Khatib AFP said in an interview aboard the ship.
“We are liberating from the Red Sea. “
On a four-day cruise, shipping sailed beyond key progression sites, the Red Sea Project, designed to be a Maldives-style hotel destination spanning dozens of picturesque islands, and Amaala, a luxury tourism project.
For a few hours, he also anchored in front of two islands, Sindala, which bureaucracies a share of NEOM, a planned megacity of $500 billion that is about the length of Belgium.
Otherwise, out of reach of the public, cruise passengers visited the small island covered with coral reefs in golf carts and dined at an emerging Michelin-starred dining spot along the coast.
Social media influencers invited to pose for photo shoots in shallow turquoise waters and white sand beaches.
– ‘Unlimited Assistance’ –
Skeptical about the viability of giant projects against a back of sharp decline in government revenue due to a virus-induced economic contraction and sharp fall in oil prices.
The world’s largest crude oil exporter has announced plans to cut public spending by more than seven cents next year, and the budget deficit is expected to succeed at 12, consistent with the penny of gross domestic product by 2020.
But at the same time, the government is awarding multimillion-dollar contracts for what would be the world’s largest structure projects.
Saudi Arabia’s PIF, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, has awarded a number of contracts to expand NEOM, a recent high to US allocation control company Bechtel and infrastructure consulting firm Aecom.
According to the Middle East Economic Digest (MEED), the Red Sea allocation has produced transactions worth five billion riyars ($1. 33 billion) and is expected to allocate more than 3. 5 billion riyars by the end of the year.
“New projects on the Red Sea coast are advancing despite Covid-19 and low oil prices,” MeED editor Colin Foreman told the AFP.
“Over the next 3 years, Saudi Arabia will be smaller but its projects will be more important. “
Khatib, who sits on the forums of several megaprojects, adding NEOM, said progress was progressing “very quickly” with “unlimited support” from Saudi Arabia’s most sensitive leaders.
– Uplifting story –
The kingdom brought premium cruisers for the first time, as the global cruise industry has largely stagnated at the risk of possible coronavirus outbreaks on ships.
Last August, the Silver Spirit was forced to turn around after an alleged case of coronavirus on board. The ship’s staff reported that they had been quarantined in the guest cabins for two weeks.
But it resumed shortly after, with up to passengers screened twice for the virus before boarding.
Saudi Arabia introduced tourist visas last year, opening one of the last frontiers of tourism as a cornerstone of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s de facto economic diversification campaign.
With the cheapest tickets priced at around 6000 riyars (US$1600), the cruise aims to attract domestic tourists with large pockets amid a wider disruption of foreign travel.
In addition to the spacious suites and personal butlers, Saudi women featured rare costume freedoms. Abaya cape-shaped dresses were almost completely absent for Saudi women.
However, to maintain the privacy of beach-clad passengers, cell phones had to be placed in sealed bags on the island’s stopovers.
And in a country that bans alcohol, the boat’s bars will offer Merlot beer, Chardonnay and non-alcoholic lager.
The Silver Spirit has left King Abdullah’s Economic City, a billion-dollar allocation near the western city of Jeddah, which serves as an uplifting narrative for the giga allocations it presents.
The gigantic development, introduced more than a decade ago as a component of a diversification plan to build new cities, is largely empty and underscores the kingdom’s long-standing struggle to attract investment in spaces other than fossil fuels.
“The political commitment to advancing Giga’s projects turns out to be there,” said Karen Young, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute.
“But spending limited state resources on projects that are not aimed at creating tasks or taking as many people out of the public sector is not a positive step toward economic diversification. “
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