Hotelier Middle East held its first ever KSA GM Debate in Riyadh last month and unearthed a vibrant, passionate and fledgling hotel industry that is desperate to create the right offering for investors, service providers and guests. Jamie Knights reports.

A lot of people have a number of opinions and views on Saudi Arabia, the majority of whom have never stepped foot in the Kingdom.

Hotelier decided it was time to give Saudi hoteliers and tourism officials a chance to express their views, talk about what was important to them and join together to move the industry forward.

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Far from a restrictive day of cautious ‘yes men’, the attendees and speakers at the inaugural Hotelier Middle East KSA GM Debate provided a lively event where key issues and trends in the Saudi hospitality sector were debated.

From Saudisation targets and visas to security and statistics, the conference, held at the Marriott Riyadh, proved hoteliers, service providers and officials are desperate to get Saudi’s hospitality offering moving in the right direction.

The keynote speech was passionately delivered by director general of licensing and quality at Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA), Ahmed Al Eissa.

He lamented the fact that there was still “some debate about the usefulness of the tourism industry in the Kingdom”.

“The state still doesn’t regard tourism as an industry as it doesn’t meet the requirements of an industry from the local point of view,” Al Eissa said.

The long term policy of the SCTA is to promote tourism to reap economic benefits while protecting the environment at the same time.

Al Eissa said that since the inception of the body, there had been an effort to have more of its own say on how it carried out its tasks as set out by the Saudi Council of Ministers.

“One of the sectors we wanted to promote was the amount of investment in tourism as we felt the conditions were inadequate and we wanted to improve the quality of services available,” he asserted.

“All departments had to pool resources to achieve our interconnected goals and we developed a new programme in 2010. First on the agenda was the licensing and quality project.”

The project had the underlying goal of radically improving the tourism and hospitality sector in the ambitious window of two years.