Turning tourism into development: Mitigating risks and leveraging heritage assets
Tourism can be a key tool for developing local and national economies — but too often that tourism influx can disturb locals. Here's how to avoid that.
The historic city of AlUla occupies an area of around 22,000 square kilometres. The Royal Commission for AlUla has laid out a strategic roadmap for the development of the entire area based on sound social, economic and ecological principles. The objective is to create over 38,000 jobs allowing the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to diversify beyond oil and contribute over $32 billion to the national GDP by 2035. The core pillars of the AlUla strategy are: (1) tourism, heritage and nature; (2) local community; (3) economic diversification. The enabling pillars are physical development, enabling services and institutional excellence.