Saudi Arabia has significant potential to develop sustainable inbound and outbound travel over the next 2 to 3 years, Michael Prager, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing EMEA for Hilton Worldwide, said Monday during his first visit to the Kingdom. He was accompanied by Haitham Mattar, Vice President of Sales EMEA. “The visit is part of Hilton Worldwide's efforts to strengthen and develop Hilton's KSA national and global sales teams,” Prager said. A corporate dinner, recognizing Hilton Worldwide's key partners in Saudi Arabia, was arranged at the Aromi restaurant in the Qasr Al Sharq, A Waldorf Astoria. In June, Hilton Worldwide announced plans to develop six new properties in Makkah. The new hotels are part of the Jabal Omar project, one of the world's largest hotel developments, and will bring to 12 the total number of hotels in the company's development pipeline in Saudi Arabia. Hilton Worldwide said it also plans to recruit 9,000 new team members over the next three to four years, many of whom will be Saudis. Hilton Worldwide will manage 30 percent of the rooms in the development, across six hotels – four Hilton Hotels & Resorts properties, including an all-suites hotel and a convention center, a DoubleTree by Hilton and the first Conrad hotel in the country. Conrad Makkah, Hilton Suites Makkah, Hilton Bab Makkah North, Hilton Bab Makkah South, Hilton Makkah Convention Hotel and DoubleTree by Hilton Makkah are scheduled to open in 2014. “In the next three years we will triple our presence in Saudi Arabia and have a total of nearly 5,000 rooms in Makkah alone,” said Ian Carter, president, global operations and development, Hilton Worldwide. BMI forecast earlier that there will be 381,000 hotel rooms in Saudi Arabia by 2015, up from an estimated 242,000 in 2010. The number of tourist arrivals was also expected to grow by an average of 6 percent y-o-y to the end of forecast period in 2015. The Tourism Information and Research Center of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities recently estimated that there will be 8.8 million road trips this year, which represents growth of 27.5 percent. The National Tourism Strategy expected tourism to create 2.3 million jobs by 2020. Specialists said Saudis spend more than SR60 billion on travel in summer.
