Saudi mountains, Crimean beaches beckon for COVID staycations
Published 11 Jul,2020 via Bloomberg News Service (Middle East Edition) - When the pandemic hobbled Saudi Arabia’s plans to become a global tourism hub just months after opening its borders for the first time, officials looked for the bright side.
There won’t be any foreign vacationers sunning on the kingdom’s beaches this summer. But there’s a new market to woo: Saudis trapped at home. Along with countries around the world that are trying to recoup some of their tourism losses through domestic travel, the government leaned into the disruption, stoking patriotic sentiment with calls for a “Saudi summer.”
“The amount of constraint that people are feeling, the suffocation — this is a chance,” Fahd Hamidaddin, chief executive of the Saudi Tourism Authority, said during a video conference to announce the summer strategy.
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Vivian Nereim, Richard Weiss and Anna Andrianova