When the pandemic hindered Saudi Arabia’s plans to become a global resort just a few months after opening its borders for the first time, officials sought the bright side. There will be no foreign tourists in the sun on the kingdom’s beaches this summer. But there is a new market to be courted: the Saudis trapped in their homes. With countries around the world seeking some of their tourism losses through domestic travel, the government has been tackling disruption, fighting for patriotic sentiment by calling for a “Saudi summer.”
“The amount of tension other people feel, asphyxiation, is an opportunity,” Fahd Hamidaddin, ceo of the Saudi Arabian Tourism Authority, said at a video convention to announce the summer strategy.
The new coronavirus has decimated tourism, opening up a giant hole in one-tenth of the world’s economic output that the industry represents. International tourist arrivals fell by 97% in April and the World Travel and Tourism Council predicts around a hundred million losses of tasks, at most productive, as border closures, fitness fears, failing hotels and airlines, and income source restrictions keep travelers at home.
But tourism hotspots will not be affected in the same way, and some primary economies, such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom and Germany, hope to lessen the pain by capturing domestic spending going abroad.
“There is a transparent opportunity for some countries to mitigate the surprise of incoming call loss by encouraging citizens to spend their holidays at home,” said David Goodger, Managing Director of Tourism and Economics for Europe and the Middle East, a unit of Oxford Economics. . “Countries with giant foreign markets that sometimes have a tourist deficit are the most productive to take advantage of this trend,” he said, while warning that any benefit will be relative.
Take Russia, whose citizens generally spend about $20 billion more each year than Russia earns on incoming trips. In the Krasnodar region, on the Black Sea coast, hotel reservations are arriving, according to Delfin, one of the largest tour operators in the region.
“June is almost a general disaster, but July will be even bigger than last year,” Said Delfin leader Sergey Romashkin.
Moscow workplace worker Anastasiya Kulagina planned to spend her summer vacation in Tuscany, spending about $6,000 for a three-week stay. Instead, the 36-year-old is contemplating Yalta in Crimea, which Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed to Ukraine in 2014. Despite the new water shortage there and the fact that the reception infrastructure of the Black Sea city dates largely from During the Cold War, Kulagina disappointed to see that the costs were almost the same as in Tuscany. But he has few other options.
In Australia, sealed borders are enabling some regional operators to tap a wealthy and previously unattainable market.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Steve Hinks, who runs the Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, a five-hour drive from Sydney. He felt that the zoo, which offers a luxury camp among animals around the world, has never responded to so many requests in such a short time.
“If we seize this opportunity and ‘wow’ these visitors then we have the chance to keep them again into the future,” he said.
For much of the world though, tourists staying closer to home will create a loss of revenue that domestic travellers couldn’t possibly make up — especially in places dependent on foreign-exchange income that have limited domestic spending power. Countries like the Maldives, where tourism accounts for over half of gross domestic product, or island nations in the Caribbean, where beaches have gone empty, will suffer.
In Turkey, it could take as long as three years for the industry to recover, according to Emre Narin, chief executive of Marti Hotels & Marinas, which is listed on the Istanbul stock exchange and operates six hotels and a marina.
Around 8 million Turks travelled within the country last year, compared with 50 million foreign visitors the country was expecting this year. “Domestic tourism cannot possibly replace that kind of a market,” Narin said.
Destinations that rely more on domestic and short-haul tourism — like Japan, China and Mexico — will be more resilient to the downturn, Goodger said. As to countries that have a new “domestic opportunity,” the U.K. tops his list.
But overall, COVID-19 means that global tourism spending, whether domestic and foreign, will decline particularly in 2020, and does not expect them to return to 2019 grades until 2023. As task retention systems and the government come to an end, the global can only see additional spikes in task losses, he said.
Gloria Guevara Manzo, president of the World Travel and Tourism Council, said she saw genuine winners.
“The truth is that you don’t spend the same amount on traveling in your country as abroad,” he said.
For Tony Lucas, who runs a kiosk in front of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Paris, “it’s a disaster.” Before the lockout, you can have a source of income of 1,000 euros depending on the day; now it’s “just” 50 euros, he says.
Similarly in Saudi Arabia, domestic trips won’t make up for the suspension of religious tourism to the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina. Yet officials are full of optimism at the chance to convince Saudis that there’s beauty in their own country — a relatively new concept to many. In one local joke, a foreigner arrives in Riyadh and asks his taxi driver for his favourite local spot. The driver responds: “the airport.”
But non-religious tourism is so underdeveloped that there’s not much to lose. Hamidaddin said he would be pleased to attract only 5% of Saudi tourists who are usually abroad.
Among them is Faisal Almshari, 34, who would usually spend the summer travelling Europe. This year he’s looking at the foggy mountains of southern Saudi Arabia. And not just for fun — he hopes to make some money off of it.
“I was surprised,” Almshari said, describing the joy of locating summer hiking sites to expand its fledgling tourism business. “We don’t want to go abroad.”
(This article was published from a firm thread without converting the text. Only the name has been changed).
Follow more on Facebook and Twitter
“O item.title”