Abha tourism strategy and its impact
I drove to Abha this summer with my family. It's a ten hour drive from Riyadh and I enjoyed it more than I expected to.
Abha sits in the mountains of the southwest, at altitude, with stone architecture that's been there for generations and a summer climate that has nothing in common with the rest of the Kingdom in August. That combination is why people have always gone there. It isn't new.
What's new is everything that's been built around it. And having spent my career watching strategies either land or fall apart, I found it hard to look at Abha as a tourist for very long.
It started as a direction, not a plan
Vision 2030 named tourism in 2016. That was direction: a statement that we intended to build a sector we didn't really have, at scale, within a generation.
The Asir Development Strategy, the plan written specifically for this region, came in 2021. Five years later. It was also the first development plan in the Kingdom written for a region rather than a sector.
You could read those five years as delay. I'd argue the opposite, and this is the part I keep coming back to.
A national target can't tell you who owns delivery, where the capital comes from, what gets built first, or who's accountable when something slips. Those questions have to be worked out separately and they take years to answer properly. Most programmes that fail do so because that work got skipped, not because the ambition was wrong.
Then it got an owner
The Aseer Development Authority was established to own the implementation of that strategy. Not a coordinating committee, and not a programme bolted onto somebody's existing portfolio, but a body whose job is this region and this plan, accountable for delivering it.
That is the step most programmes skip, and it is the one that decides everything afterwards. A strategy without an organisation whose only job is delivering it moves at the speed of whoever happens to have spare capacity.
Underneath the Authority sit dedicated vehicles for individual assets. Soudah Development, set up as a Public Investment Fund company in February 2021, is building the mountain destination at just over 3,000 metres. That is a sensible structure: one body accountable for the region, separate entities accountable for the things being built in it.
The capital followed. Government-backed projects in the region have now passed SR25 billion, with another SR4 billion committed.
The growth has been steady rather than sudden
What struck me on the ground is that the change didn't arrive all at once. Each season has been visibly better than the one before it.
This summer the Asir season ran from late June to the start of September, targeting more than three million visitors. It was supported by over 14,000 hospitality units. Abha International Airport handled close to 10,000 flights across the season, carrying around 1.8 million passenger seats. New hospitality projects worth roughly SR444 million launched during the year, and the season created around 3,000 seasonal jobs.
Those aren't projections. That's what actually happened.
What you can see on the ground
Three things are obvious to any visitor, and each one tells you something.
The infrastructure is in place. Roads, airport capacity, the practical things that decide whether a destination is reachable at all. That wasn't true ten years ago.
The tourist sites are developed and operating rather than announced. There's a real difference between a masterplan and somewhere you can take your children on a Tuesday, and Abha has crossed it.
And the growth in food and beverage is everywhere. That's the one that interests me most, because nobody plans it centrally. Restaurants and cafés open when operators with their own money at risk have decided the demand is real and it's going to last. It's probably the most honest indicator a destination has.
Why the sequencing matters
The flagship asset isn't finished. Soudah Peaks, the mountain destination at just over 3,000 metres, is still being built.
And yet a visitor this summer had a complete experience without it. I don't think that's an accident, and it might be the most important decision in the whole programme.
The usual failure in destination development is to build the icon first and sort out the access afterwards. You end up with a remarkable asset that nobody can conveniently reach, sitting in a region with no hotel supply, no restaurants and no trained staff. It's a familiar mistake and an expensive one.
Asir did it the other way round. The enabling layer went in first and the flagship is arriving into a place that already works.
What I'd take from it
I write fairly often about the distance between a strategy and a result, because it's where I've spent my career, and most of what I've seen is the gap rather than the crossing.
Abha is a case where somebody crossed it. Direction set in 2016, a regional plan in 2021, an authority accountable for implementing it, enabling infrastructure ahead of the headline assets, and delivery you could test season by season instead of waiting ten years for a single opening.
Anyone can write a strategy. Few can lead it. This one was led, through the difficult middle where most plans stop, by people whose names aren't on any of it.
It's worth going to see.
If you're working on something caught between announcement and delivery, I'm glad to compare notes.
References
Every figure used above, with its source.
Aseer Development Strategy, launched 2021 under the name Qimam wa Shiyam, the first development plan in the Kingdom tailored to a region. Saudi Vision 2030:
https://www.vision2030.gov.sa/en/explore/strategies/aseer-development-strategy
Aseer Development Authority (ASDA), the body responsible for overseeing implementation:
https://www.asda.gov.sa/en/strategy
Government-backed projects past SR25 billion, plus a further SR4 billion. Arab News:
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2602370/business-economy
Soudah Development established as a PIF company, February 2021. Public Investment Fund:
https://www.pif.gov.sa/en/our-investments/our-portfolio/soudah-development/
Soudah Peaks masterplan, site at 3,015 metres. Soudah Development:
https://soudah.sa/en/soudah-development-newsroom/hrh-crown-prince-launches-soudah-peaks-masterplan
Target of more than 3 million visitors for the 2026 season. Saudi Gazette:
Season dates, 14,000 hospitality units, SR444 million in new projects, around 3,000 seasonal jobs, and the Abha airport flight and seat numbers. Arab News: