Saudi Arabia is starting a 1.5 billion riyal ($400 million) fund to expand the free-spirited hospitality brand Habitas across the kingdom as part of its blitz to build a tourism industry from scratch.
The hotel and events company, which has its roots in creating camps at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, plans to have as many as six new properties throughout the kingdom, in addition to two existing ones. The details aren’t finalized, but sites could range from the Red Sea coast to the inland capital of Riyadh. The aim is to attract new international visitors to Saudi Arabia—which first opened to tourists in 2019—as well as locals that haven’t done much domestic traveling.
“What’s amazing about the kingdom is just how diverse the geography is,” Chief Executive Officer Oliver Ripley says, adding that the investment in infrastructure has opened up much more of the country to potential visitors. “A lot of these locations were difficult to access, or access was until recently restricted for religious reasons.”
The funding will be anchored by the Saudi Tourism Development Fund, or TDF, which was established in June 2020 with an initial pot of 15 billion riyal to finance the industry’s growth. The kingdom’s goal is to more than double the number of tourists, to 100 million annually by 2030, including domestic travel, and increase tourism’s share of the economy from 3% to 10%, according to a document on the fund’s website. A spokesman for the TDF declined to answer questions for this story.
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