Letter on its way to Riyadh: a journey to the land of possibilities

Today I leave for Riyadh via Singapore. The intention was to go via Paris, but a flu virus changed my plans. It works in a nasty way, as we’ve all learned in recent years. Nothing will stop us now – yes! A bug, yes.

So I’m sitting in the Emirates Lounge, where it’s freezing. Airports and hotel ballrooms have their own climate zones, namely cold. When checking in I asked if everything was back to normal at Dubai airport as I have a four hour layover for my onward connection to Riyadh. The girl (masked) smiled (I think) and replied, “Yes, everything is back to normal.”

Dubai’s reputation as a global hub took a serious blow from the Great Flood of April 16, but as usual the government acted quickly to repair the damage caused and yesterday approved a $545 million package to repair rain damage to citizens’ homes.

“We have learned great lessons in dealing with heavy rains,” Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum said after a cabinet meeting, adding that ministers approved “two billion dirhams to deal with the damage to citizens’ homes” .

Emirates chairman Sir Tim Reid sent an open letter of apology “to any customer whose travel plans have been disrupted during this time”.

He said: “We deployed more than 100 volunteers to care for disrupted customers at Dubai Airport departures and in the transit area, prioritizing medical cases, the elderly and other vulnerable travelers. To date, more than 12,000 hotel rooms in Dubai have been secured to accommodate disrupted customers, 250,000 meal vouchers have been issued and increased quantities of drinking water, blankets and other amenities have been provided.

“Behind the scenes, thousands more employees across the organization had to get our activities back on track.

“As of this morning, Saturday April 20, our regular flight schedules have been restored. Passengers previously stranded in the airport transit zone have been rebooked and are on their way to their destination. We have put together a task force to sort, reconcile and deliver some 30,000 pieces of abandoned luggage to their owners.”

Just as insects can stop us, so can nature – the two are of course completely related and we would do well to respect them.

I am in Riyadh just before the Future Hospitality Summit which will take place from April 29 to May 1 and hoteliers, consultants, lawyers, investors and developers will gather to discuss their grand plans to build the biggest tourism development before our will unfold in the very last century. eyes in history.

A Knight Frank report states that Saudi Arabia is expected to have 320,000 new hotel rooms nationwide by 2030, to accommodate an influx of 150 million domestic and international tourists annually.

I’ve never been good with numbers, but even I know that’s a lot. I wonder if in the history of the hospitality industry, so many rooms have been built in such a short time.

The expansion will boost the country’s travel and tourism industry, which already accounts for almost six percent of Saudi Arabia’s GDP and is critical to achieving the government’s target of contributing 10 percent of tourism to the economy by 2030.

Saudi Arabia welcomed a record number of visitors in 2022. Tourism expenditure reached US$23.2 billion (SAR87 billion) in the first half of 2023, an increase of 132 percent over the same period in 2022. Over the same six-month period they recorded 14.6 percent. million international arrivals – representing a 142 percent year-on-year increase – reflecting the strongest half-year performance for the Saudi tourism sector.

Well, I’m happy to be added as a statistic.

I’m curious to see with my own eyes what’s going on. Just as I visited Dubai all those decades ago and my jaw dropped and my fingers ached, I’m sure keeping track of all those reports of development after development will leave me overwhelmed by the same feelings, except probably a thousandfold. .

The numbers just sound bigger, the possibilities more incredulous.

I look forward to the journey ahead. I’m going to explore Dubai airport to see if there are any signs of water damage. I have time.

And when I arrive in Riyadh and check into the Radisson Blu in Riyadh’s diplomatic district, I can imagine that there will be 320,000 more hotel rooms like this in the next six years.

Anyway, since I had time on my hands, I asked AI to visualize an image of Dubai in 2050 for me, and it gave me this. There is a lot of water.

Out of curiosity, I also asked AI to propose Riyadh for 2050 and this is what it yielded:

Hallucination or inspiration?