Visit Saudi's 6 Percent Lesson: A Target Counts Everybody, It Never Counts the Persuaded

Six per cent, and what the other ninety-four are doing

On 27 September 2019 Saudi Arabia started issuing tourist visas. In the first ten days, about 24,000 foreigners entered the country on one. That is the true zero point of the story everybody tells about Saudi tourism, and it is worth holding onto, because four years later the Kingdom announced it had passed 100 million visitors a year, clearing a 2030 target while 2023 was still being counted.

The milestone is real. The target was real, it was published in 2019, and it was beaten. None of that is in dispute here and none of it gets taken apart in this piece.

What gets taken apart is the sentence that travels with it. The retelling is that global marketing and a new visa built a tourism sector from near zero to more than a hundred million visitors. So ask the question this series always asks first: what is a visitor.

In 2025 the Kingdom recorded about 122.6 million of them. 93.3 million were domestic, meaning trips taken inside Saudi Arabia by people who already live there. That leaves 29.3 million inbound. Of those, the Ministry of Tourism's own purpose split puts 48.3 per cent as religious and 24.1 per cent as leisure. Multiply it out and the international leisure traveller, the person a Visit Saudi campaign in Europe or India or China is actually addressing, numbers about 7.1 million.

7.1 million against 122.6 million is under six per cent. And in the year the headline set its record, the inbound half of it fell by 1.6 per cent while the domestic half rose by 8.3 per cent. The number went up. The part the marketing could move went down.

What the programme genuinely built, which is a great deal

This is the second nation-branding subject in a row, so the same discipline applies as last time and it applies harder. What follows judges a marketing claim. It does not judge the policy, and several things this programme set out to do plainly happened.

The clearest one is money rather than headcount. UN Tourism ranked Saudi Arabia 12th in the world for international tourism receipts in 2023, up from 27th in 2019, which was the largest jump anywhere in the top 50. International tourism revenue was up about 148 per cent on 2019, the fastest in the G20. Inbound spending went from SAR 135 billion in 2023 to SAR 168.5 billion in 2024 to SAR 176.6 billion in 2025.

Read the 2025 pair together, because it is the most interesting fact in the whole file and almost nobody quotes it: inbound spending rose 4.8 per cent in a year when inbound visitors fell 1.6 per cent. Spend per inbound visitor went from roughly SAR 5,670 to roughly SAR 6,030. Fewer people, each worth more. That is what a successful destination-marketing programme looks like when it works, and it is the opposite of the headline everybody chose to lead with.

The rest of the delivery is real too. Tourism is about 5 per cent of GDP against a Vision 2030 target of more than 10. The sector passed one million jobs by August 2025. AlUla, Diriyah and the Red Sea moved from renderings to places with opening dates. The visa itself is a genuine product improvement, one year, multiple entry, ninety days, applied for online, in a country that had issued essentially no leisure visas in its history.

So this is not a piece arguing that nothing happened. It is a piece about which number was used to prove it, and about what happens to a marketing function that reports the wrong one.

The decision: open the border first, then market the country

The order of events is the argument, so here it is with dates on it.

The tourist e-visa opened on 27 September 2019, initially to citizens of 49 to 66 countries depending on which announcement you read, one year, multiple entry, ninety days per visit. The National Tourism Strategy published that year set the target: 100 million annual visits by 2030, domestic and inbound together. The Saudi Tourism Authority, which owns the Visit Saudi brand, was established afterwards, in 2020.

The global marketing arrived later still. Visit Saudi sponsored LaLiga, attempted a sponsorship of the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup that was withdrawn after player objections, signed Lionel Messi as a tourism ambassador, and launched the Go Beyond What You Think campaign in January 2024 across Europe, India and China as a three-month run of television, social, digital and online travel agency placements.

So the visa preceded the campaign by more than four years, and the milestone that the campaign is credited with was cleared in 2023, before the campaign built around Messi had run. That is not a small sequencing detail. It is the entire causal question, and the plan behind this series names it in its own lesson, which reads marketing plus product, meaning visas, events and destinations. The word product in that sentence is doing all the work.

One thing the programme did honestly, and the retellings did not. The 100 million target counted domestic visits from the day it was written, and the revised 150 million target is published as 80 million domestic and 70 million international. The Ministry has never hidden the split. Every table it publishes has two columns. The compression into one big number happens downstream, in the coverage and in the decks, which is where most measurement failures actually happen.

The four numbers, and what each one counts

Four claims carry this story. Run the noun test on each, which is one search per number.

First, a visitor is a trip and not a person. The domestic figure counts tourist trips taken by residents, so a family that goes to AlUla in March, Abha in July and Jeddah in December contributes three. The Ministry's own gross travel propensity reading for 2024 is 3.1 trips per resident. So 93.3 million domestic visits is not 93.3 million people in a country of roughly 35 million, and it cannot be: it is a count of journeys, which is the correct way to measure tourism and the wrong way to read a population claim.

Second, a tourist includes a pilgrim. 16.92 million foreign Umrah performers came in 2024, plus 1.61 million foreign Hajj pilgrims, for more than 18.5 million religious arrivals from abroad against an inbound total of 29.7 million. The Ministry's purpose split says the same thing from the other direction: religious was 41.5 per cent of inbound trips in 2024 and 48.3 per cent in 2025. Umrah has run continuously for fourteen centuries. It responds to permit capacity, flight cost and the religious calendar. It is not evidence about a campaign, and its share of inbound rose in the year the total fell.

Third, the milestone number itself has three values. The minister's own count for 2023 was 77 million domestic and 27 million international, which is 104 million. It was widely reported as 106.2 million. The Ministry's annual statistical report later put it at 109.3 million, made of 81.9 million domestic and 27.4 million inbound. The achievement is also described as six years early in some places and seven in others, since the target year was 2030. This is the pattern this series has learned to read: when a famous figure circulates in several versions with only the milestone pinned, nobody has fixed the measure.

Fourth, the baseline has two values, and they disagree by enough to change the growth rate. The Ministry of Tourism puts 2019 inbound at 17.5 million. The World Bank series, compiled on the standard international-arrivals basis, puts Saudi Arabia at 20.29 million for the same year. Growth to 29.3 million in 2025 is either 67 per cent or 44 per cent depending on which 2019 you start from, and the retellings use neither, because they start from an implied zero.

The scoreboard

Every visitor and spending figure in this table is reported by the programme being examined, which is the caveat the season plan attaches to this episode and it is repeated here rather than buried. The Ministry of Tourism compiles and publishes the visitor series, so it is both the subject and the source, and no independent body counts Saudi domestic trips. The one outside series used here is the World Bank international-arrivals figure for 2019, which is compiled on a standard basis and does not match the Ministry's own number for the same year, and both are given. The international leisure figures are derived in this article by applying the published purpose-of-visit share to the published inbound count, and are labelled as derived because the programme does not publish them. Hotel occupancy and length of stay come from the General Authority for Statistics quarterly establishment survey, which covers licensed establishments only. Riyal and dollar conversions are approximate at about 3.75 riyals to the dollar. Several sources carrying these figures are blocked by the egress proxy used to research this piece, including the Ministry's own annual statistical report as hosted at ent.news, argaam.com, casci.ch, vision2030.ai and skift.com, so those figures were confirmed through consistent search results quoting them and through a second outlet reporting the same number, rather than by opening the documents directly.

The autopsy: the visa opened the door, the calendar filled it

Put the split on one line and the argument finishes itself. 122.6 million total, 93.3 million of it domestic trips, 29.3 million inbound, 14.2 million of that inbound religious, about 7.1 million leisure. Every stage of that chain is reported by the programme itself. Nothing in it is contested.

Now ask which of those blocks a marketing campaign can address. Not domestic travel, which grew 8.3 per cent in 2025 on the back of new domestic supply, a public holiday calendar, entertainment licensing and the simple fact that a country with rising incomes and better roads takes more trips. Not pilgrimage, which is gated by permits and by faith rather than by persuasion. That leaves international leisure, around 7.1 million people, and the number did not grow: inbound as a whole fell 1.6 per cent in 2025 while the religious share of it rose, which means the leisure block was flat at best.

2026 sharpened it. In the first quarter, inbound visitors fell 13 per cent to 8.3 million while domestic trips rose 16 per cent to 28.9 million. Say the confound out loud, because it is real and it is most of the story: UN Tourism recorded international arrivals across the whole Middle East down 14 per cent in that quarter against global growth of 2 per cent, driven by the regional conflict, flight suspensions and higher fuel and travel costs. Saudi Arabia at minus 13 slightly outperformed its region. That is a regional shock and not a campaign failure, and anybody presenting the quarter as proof of anything about Visit Saudi is doing the same thing the celebratory version does, in the other direction.

The capacity numbers are the other half. In 2025 hotel occupancy ran 63 per cent in the first quarter, 53.2 in the second, 49.1 in the third and 57.3 in the fourth, with Makkah and Madinah posting gains while Riyadh fell on both occupancy and room rate. Average stay was 4.1 nights in the first quarter and 3.8 in the fourth. A destination in the global top 12 by receipts is running its rooms a bit above half full for most of the year, and the quarters where it fills them are the pilgrimage quarters in the pilgrimage cities.

So the honest reading is not that the marketing failed. It is that the marketing has been credited with a number that is 94 per cent composed of things it did not cause, while the thing it did cause, a rise in what each international visitor is worth, sits in a different column that nobody puts on a slide. A programme that reported spend per inbound visitor as its headline would have a better story and a harder one, because that number can fall.

The control group: the country that ran no campaign at all

When a tactic is famous the copies are the control group, and here the control group is the countries that changed the visa and did not buy the campaign.

Albania is the cleanest of them. It had 6.4 million foreign visitors in 2019 and 11.7 million in 2024, a rise of about 82 per cent. Saudi inbound over the same period went from 17.5 million to 29.7 million, about 70 per cent. Albania has visa exemptions for around 125 countries, including a run of temporary waivers for Gulf states, and its entire Ministry of Tourism and Environment budget for 2025 was 3.9 billion lek, roughly 37 million dollars, covering visitor infrastructure and environmental protection as well as promotion. Its international marketing is trade stands at FITUR and ITB. There is no ambassador, no three-market television buy, and it grew faster.

Qatar is the extreme version. UN Tourism had it at plus 147 per cent against 2019 for January to July 2024, the strongest in the world. It opened visa-free entry to around 80 nationalities in 2017. It also hosted a World Cup, which is a confound the size of the finding, so Qatar is worth naming and not worth leaning on.

Read the three together and the variable present in every case is the visa. The variable present in only one is the global campaign, and that one is not the fastest grower. This does not prove the campaign did nothing, and the comparison is not like for like on anything except the growth rate: Albania is small, cheap, coastal and next door to the market that fills it, which is a structural advantage Saudi Arabia cannot buy. But the claim on the table was specifically about growth rate, specifically about a sector built from near zero, and on that claim a ministry running trade stands on 37 million dollars matched it.

There is one more control sitting inside the same country, and it is the sharpest of them. Saudi Arabia ran two tourism products side by side during exactly these years. One had global marketing behind it and one had none, because religious travel has never been advertised. The unmarketed one grew its share of inbound from 41.5 per cent to 48.3 per cent in a single year, in the year the marketed total fell.

The right order: split the number, then market the part you can move

The first step is to split your headline number into the part your marketing could have caused and the part that was always going to happen, in writing, before the next board meeting. For Saudi tourism the chain runs 122.6 million, then 29.3 million once you remove residents travelling at home, then about 7.1 million once you remove pilgrimage and visits to relatives. Three lines, each one a division, each one honest, and the last line is the only one a campaign can be held to. Most companies have the same chain and have never drawn it, because the first number is the flattering one and drawing the chain is how you find out that the flattering number belongs to somebody else's department.

The second step is to report the addressable number monthly, next to the headline, permanently. Not instead of the headline, which is a real result and belongs to the country or the company. Next to it. The gap between the two lines is the whole conversation, and a marketing function that will not show the gap is asking to be judged on a number it does not control, which works beautifully in a good year and is unsurvivable in a bad one.

The third step is to buy the product before you buy the campaign, in that order, because that is the order that worked here. The single most effective piece of tourism marketing Saudi Arabia has ever run was a visa form, and 24,000 people used it in ten days with no ambassador attached. The equivalent inside a company is always unglamorous and always cheaper than the campaign: the delivery window, the payment terms, the opening hours, the returns policy, the form with four fields instead of eleven, the phone that gets answered. A campaign pointed at a product with friction in it buys you a visit to the friction.

For a mid-sized Saudi company the practical version is one afternoon of arithmetic. Take the total customer number the company quotes, the one on the website and in the investor deck, and subtract the repeat transactions counted as separate customers, then the walk-ins who came because of the location, then the accounts that arrived through the founder's own relationships, then the government or group contracts that were never contestable. What is left is the number marketing is accountable for. It is usually somewhere between a tenth and a third of what was on the slide, and the useful part is not the embarrassment. It is that everybody stops arguing about the budget once the addressable number is on the wall, because the budget is now being spent against a figure that moves when the work is good.

And be careful with the word visitor, or user, or customer, in exactly the way this episode has been careful with it. These are all container words, and the container is usually full of somebody else's work. Define it once, in one sentence, in writing, and the definition will outlive three marketing managers.

The takeaways

The famous number counts everybody who moved. Of Saudi Arabia's 122.6 million visitors in 2025, 93.3 million were residents travelling inside the country and about 14.2 million of the inbound total were religious. International leisure, the audience a global tourism campaign addresses, is around 7.1 million, under six per cent of the headline.

The milestone was cleared before the campaign it is credited to. The tourist e-visa opened on 27 September 2019 and 24,000 foreigners used it in ten days. The 100 million target fell in 2023. The Messi-fronted global campaign launched in January 2024.

Check the unit. The domestic figure counts trips and not people, at a reported 3.1 trips per resident in 2024, so it can exceed the population without anybody being dishonest. The programme publishes both columns. The compression into one headline happens downstream.

Check the baseline and the milestone for multiple values. 2019 inbound is 17.5 million on the Ministry's count and 20.29 million on the World Bank series. The 2023 total was announced as 104 million, reported as 106.2 million and later stated as 109.3 million. A figure with several versions is a figure nobody fixed the measure for.

The control group ran no campaign. Albania went from 6.4 million foreign visitors in 2019 to 11.7 million in 2024, about 82 per cent, against Saudi inbound at about 70 per cent, on a whole-ministry budget of roughly 37 million dollars and a stand at two trade fairs.

Say what worked, because something did. Saudi Arabia went from 27th to 12th in the world on international tourism receipts, international tourism revenue is up about 148 per cent on 2019 and leads the G20, and inbound spending rose 4.8 per cent in 2025 in a year inbound visitors fell 1.6 per cent. The yield went up. That is the result, and it is not the one being reported.

Frequently asked questions

This article is part of BMD's marketing case-study series. Episode 21 is the sixth of the Gulf run. Episode 22 is a wallet that belonged to a phone company, and the question of whether the product won or the distribution it was born inside did. That is stc pay.

Sources and further reading

About BMD

Most companies don't have a marketing problem. They have a marketing department that was never built. BMD is a boutique consultancy that installs structured, measurable marketing departments inside mid-market companies across the GCC. We don't run your campaigns, and we don't hand you a strategy deck and leave. We build the operating system: the structure, the measurement, and the ownership that turn marketing into a function leadership can rely on. The method is the BUILD framework, published and practiced: a book, an online program, a community of Gulf founders and marketers applying it, and diagnostics that replace assumptions with measurement. Delivered in Arabic and English, founder-led.

Redha Alayesh

A marketer with a software engineer's discipline and a scientist's mindset. Across 40+ marketing departments in the GCC, he built the BUILD framework to solve the problem he kept finding: capable marketers trapped inside companies that never built them a department.