Tourism as an Engine for Economic Diversification: An exploratory study of Saudi Arabia’s Tourism Strategy and Marketing Initiatives

This paper discusses the importance of economic diversification for the Natural resource rich nations with a special focus on Saudi Arabia. The paper will concentrate on Saudi Arabia’s efforts to achieve diversification by investing in tourism industry. Natural resources are the real wealth of nations. The availability of resources can directly influence a country's ability to grow. But at the same time a nation's economy may suffer significant and unfavourable repercussions if it is overly reliant on one or two resources, this phenomenon is called as “resource curse”. Economic diversification must therefore be successfully implemented for an economy to enjoy long-term prosperity. Saudi Arabia has made notable efforts in diversifying its economy to reduce its reliance on oil and mitigate the resource curse. With tourism industry being one of the largest non-oil contributors and one of the biggest jobs creating sector, the Saudi Arabian government recognizes the importance and ability of the tourism industry and considers it as one of the prime drivers in efforts of diversifying the economy. The paper will analyse role of tourism marketing in establishing a growing and glowing tourism sector. Finally, we examine the Saudi Arabian government's tourism marketing initiatives and the results it yielded.