122 Million Visitors. Saudi Brands Are Still Talking to the Same Crowd.

Saudi Arabia welcomed 122 million tourists and visitors in 2025. The original Vision 2030 target was 100 million — by 2030. The Kingdom crossed it in 2023, six years early, and then kept going. The revised target is now 150 million annual visitors by the end of the decade, with 70 million of those coming from outside the region.

These are infrastructure and policy wins. They tell you the volume is there. What they don't tell you is whether Saudi brands — restaurants, retail chains, entertainment venues, hospitality businesses — are speaking to this new, expanded, more diverse audience in a way that actually reaches them. Most aren't.

A Customer Base That Changed Faster Than the Brief

For most of the past two decades, the majority of visitors to Saudi Arabia were GCC nationals, pilgrims, and expatriate workers. The communication infrastructure that Saudi brands built — Arabic-first, culturally familiar, calibrated to a known audience — was appropriate for that reality.

That reality has changed. Visitors now arrive from India, China, Indonesia, the United States, South Korea, and dozens of other markets — many with no prior knowledge of Saudi culture, no Arabic, and no inherited familiarity with what the country offers. Red Sea Global is targeting 3,000 hotel rooms across 16 resorts by end of 2026. Amaala's nine hotels are slated for Q3 2026. Qiddiya is projecting 17 million annual visitors. These are guests who will arrive with expectations shaped by global hospitality brands, not local tradition.

The challenge isn't only for the mega-projects. It's for every Saudi business that touches a tourist: the coffee shop near the museum, the restaurant in the mall, the local retail brand at the airport. Their customer base just became global, whether they planned for it or not.

The answer isn't to abandon the Saudi identity and become generic. It's to make the Saudi identity legible to people who have never encountered it before.

Translation Is Not the Answer

The instinctive response is to add an English page, translate the menu, and call it done. That's a technical fix for a strategic problem. A tourist from Seoul reading your English menu doesn't need a translation — they need context. What is this dish? Where does it come from? Why does it matter? The story, not the label.

The brands that will thrive in a 122-million-visitor Saudi Arabia aren't the ones who translated their existing communication — they're the ones who thought about what their identity means to someone encountering it for the first time. That's a different brief entirely. It requires knowing what's distinctive about you, what's universal in it, and what needs an explanatory bridge.

What Saudi Brands Can Do Concretely

Start by auditing your customer touchpoints for a visitor with no Saudi cultural background: your social media, your signage, your online menus, your booking experience. What assumptions does each touchpoint make about what the customer already knows? Every assumption is a potential gap.

Then distinguish between what needs to change and what must stay. The cultural specificity isn't the problem — it's often the competitive advantage. The Saudi identity, well communicated, is distinct in a world of generic global hospitality. The goal isn't to sound international. The goal is to be genuinely welcoming without erasing what makes you worth visiting.

Saudi Arabia earned its 122 million visitors through infrastructure, policy, and genuine investment. The brands that capture value from those visitors will earn it through communication that meets people where they are — curious, arriving from somewhere else, and willing to be surprised.