Saudi Arabia: Digital Tourism Workshop Saudi Arabia

What

The World Bank was asked by the Ministry of Tourism (MT) and their Digital Tourism Team to review the executive summary of their Digital Tourism Blueprint and digital tourism competitiveness benchmarking, and then conduct a workshop with tourism and line ministry stakeholders. Scott Wayne focused on the benchmarking, extracting from past work analyzing KSA performance on the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Travel & Tourism Development Index (TTDI), which was published in May 2022. The TTDI was previously known as the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI) and was last published in 2019. Professor Dimitrios Buhalis presented extensively on Smart Tourism.

For the benchmarking component of the workshop, Scott developed a presentation that summarized the analysis and included comparisons to other indices:

• The Digital Competitiveness Index
• The GovTech Maturity Index (World Bank)
• Country Branding Ranking (Bloom Consulting)
• The Frontier Technology Readiness Index (UNCTAD)
• The Digital City Index (Bloom Consulting).

Examples of digital tourism success stories from:

• Dubrovnik (Croatia)
• Porto (Portugal)
• Thailand’s program for Digital Transformation and Innovation Development for Smart Tourism.