Travel on verge of transformation, driven by AI – STA experiments with unconventional partners

Given how openly most Saudis speak about their family, especially their mothers, I thought it fitting that I should start my interview with Fahd Hamidaddin, CEO of Saudi Tourism Authority, with a question about his family, and the biggest lesson his mother taught him.

When I asked him what it was like to grow up with nine siblings, he said that what was interesting was not the number but that three were welcomed into the family by his mother. “She welcomed my step siblings, the three of them, and she raised them with us. Today, I cannot think of whether they are half or full siblings. Because she treated them with the same protection, cared love, and attention.”

And so the biggest lesson he learnt from her – “to be welcoming and giving”.

Asked how she felt then about his job as CEO of the STA, a role he took up in March 2020, which is to welcome and be giving to the 150m visitors expected by 2030, he said, “She’s proud but she’s also cautious. She’s proud because she can see the impact that goes way beyond the numbers. She sees the impact on her grand-daughters, the proud narrative of Arabia to the world.

“This land is not like any other land. This land has witnessed the wealth of so many civilisations, prophesies that have left us great assets and, more importantly, lessons of wisdom. It has seen the birth of legends, languages, religions – being able to share this with the world definitely gives her pride. And she’s an avid traveller herself, curious, wanting to learn from other cultures but the time must come where we get to share it as well.

“So she is cautious about preserving our culture and believe that while welcoming others, make sure you don’t lose yourself.”

He related a debate he had with his sisters about music – whether they should listen to English music or stick to Arabic music. “And she said, “I don’t know about English music, but I know about culture. Cultures that fence themselves out are the weakest,  the strongest are those that engage and exchange.”

This is why while he’s definitely got his eye on the macro-economic numbers – 150m visitors (80m domestic and 70m international) and 10% of GDP by 2030 – he’s mindful of ensuring “our intangibles are preserved, rewarded and celebrated”.

“Without discounting numbers, numbers don’t lie, they are the concrete estimates of delivery, achievements, success. Most of the numbers are macro-economic,” he said. “We are the capital of youth. What tourism does uniquely in the world is that it provides new jobs at a higher rate than any other sector. At a time where most of the sectors are losing jobs to machinery, tourism is still providing new jobs, and will continue to do so as grow.

“But more importantly, unemployment is a threat to some countries, let alone a country that is youth-dense. It’s not so hard to hire the professionals, the low skills are the hardest to hire. The beauty of tourism is that it hires low skills and gives them dreams and career growth that is not found in other sectors.”

He cited examples of industry leaders who are started in entry-level roles like janitors or waiters, showcasing the sector’s potential for upward mobility. “You don’t need to be a graduate of an Ivy League to make it and become a leader at the world level,” he said.

Tourism also leads to empowerment of women, allowing many to become entrepreneurs and senior executives in corporations. The country’s equivalent of Airbnb – HiHome –has a female founder, Nourah A.Alsadoun. In business, Fahd cited examples such as Rania Nashar, the first female CEO of Saudi commercial bank, Samba Financial Group, and Sarah Al-Suhaimi, who at the age of 44, became the first chairwoman of the Saudi Stock Exchange.

STA practises equal pay and what he calls “positive discrimination”, with practices such as extended maternity leave and the right to bring along a chaperone on business trips. “I’m very proud to say we have the highest ratio of women in any government entity. We have 43% women, and it’s growing.”

A billboard in Riyadh celebrating The Year of The Camel, part of annual themed programmes to educate, inspire, and rally around the preservation of the kingdom’s cultural heritage.

Keeping the integrity of “Hafawah”

For him, maintaining the authenticity of “Hafawah”, the Saudi welcome, a synonym to being generous, welcoming, and caring, is a priority, ensuring that cultural generosity remains a hallmark of the visitor experience as tourism grows.

He cited anecdotes of travellers who tell him that after staying a week or two at a local home, “the house owner says to the visitor, “no, you’re not paying, it’s on me” or Uber drivers who afford free rides to travellers after a few trips.

This is why Saudi Arabia aims to embed its cultural DNA into tourism training programmes, ensuring that the service delivery reflects “the authentic Saudi way, even if sometimes perceived as raw or intrusive, to win hearts and minds”.

“We want to do it so you can be the best version of yourself as a human being, and do it the Saudi way.”

One way in which the Ministry of Culture unites the nation around tourism is creating annual themed programmes to educate, inspire, and rally around the preservation of its cultural heritage.

Said Fahd, “The Ministry of Culture is doing a fantastic job, creating themes for every year, that preserve the intangibles like Year of Coffee, Year of Poetry and Year of Camel (this year). These are programmes that educate, inspire and rally behind common DNA with a lot of content.

“I think what we should also do at the national level is to reward those who preserve the intangibles, reward for Hafawah as we do customer service and excellence.”

Tech giants will get into travel – experiment with Tencent an eye-opener

Beyond the work at home, to get national alignment, Fahd believes the travel industry is on the verge of a transformation driven by AI and the entry of tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Netflix, which will leverage their data and personalization capabilities.

“I think we are in the age of a new transformation with AI and the tech giants will potentially get in. It’s too lucrative for them not to.”

He sees opportunities for Saudi to disrupt the traditional way of distributing and marketing the destination. Beyond the usual partnerships with OTA, which everyone does, he said Saudi had experimented with Tencent in China. “That was an eye opener. It got us all into one room and said, OK, how can we scale this up beyond China?”

Asked what the lessons were from that experiment, he said, “We learned that you can be a lot more efficient, and you can learn a lot more and much faster, if you minimize the number of partners in the total value chain management” by leveraging Tencent’s integrated ecosystem of content, travel, and social platforms.

It’s also explored unconventional partnerships with platforms like Noon, an e-commerce platform, for tourism activations, recognizing the potential of non-traditional players in the travel space. “These platforms were never looked at as trade partners, I think there is a big opportunity here.”

He believes telecom companies that control phones and content will play a bigger role in the travel industry, leveraging their control over consumer attention and data. “The Amazons of the world, the Netflix, will only play a bigger role.”

“Digitise the expected, humanise the unexpected”

He sees the human-machine relationship thus – digitise the expected and humanise the unexpected. “You still want the human touch when unexpected things happen.”

Of course, expectations are also great when you spend the kind of money Saudi is on tourism development – almost a trillion dollars, $800b of which is in giga-projects. “These are giga projects, but they’re giga responsibilities too,” he said.

Addressing traffic issues in Riyadh, he said, “Riyadh is the fastest growing city in the world for the past eight years. The infrastructure doesn’t go at the speed of that growth, so having a metro coming up, I think, will be big, and expanding big infrastructural projects like the airport and the new airport.”

Regardless of the challenges it faces, tourism is a force for good, said Fahd. “Travellers, whether they know it or not, are agents of good. They’re agents of change. Because whenever you go, and you actually connect and you learn something new, you do see yourself and others in a new light.”

Ultimately, he said, “The name of the game is sustainability, and it starts with people culture, then environment and only then economy comes in. If you do those two right, you will have an economic sustainability that becomes a reward rather than an end.”

During the interview, Fahd also shared a little-known fact about himself – that before he got into tourism, he wanted to get into film production. And so I had to ask him, if he were to make a movie about Saudi’s transformation right now, what would it be called?

Firstly, he said it wouldn’t be a movie but a series called “Welcome To Arabia” “where the director would be the Crown Prince, the cast would be the 36m people, the locations would be the highest points in the land of Arabia to the 18,000km of virgin islands and untouched coasts of the Red Sea and the plots would be about civilisations, adventure, innovation, drama …”