Dhaka: With the completion of a second Hajj pilgrimage pressed down by coronavirus restrictions, Saudi Arabia is going forward with big plans to restart the kingdom’s tourism sector to diversify its economy.

Religious tourism has traditionally been a major earner for the kingdom and one of the few ways visitors could enter the kingdom which is home to Islam’s two holiest cities Mecca and Medina.

Between the Hajj and Umrah, the kingdom hosted 9.5 million pilgrims in 2019.

However, Riyadh is eyeing to tap into a tourist market beyond religious pilgrims, as part of de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) Vision 2030 blueprint to evolve the economy beyond oil revenues.

In September 2019, Riyadh launched a tourist e-visa to attract non-Muslim visitors. But it had barely launched when coronavirus battered the global tourism industry last year.

The pandemic also hit Saudi’s crowned religious tourism industry hard.

Only 60,000 vaccinated Saudi citizens and residents were allowed on the pilgrimage this year. And in 2020, the number of worshippers was restricted to only 1,000.

The kingdom reopened its borders to a handful of countries for tourism on May 30, but has since imposed new entry bans with the outbreak of the coronavirus Delta variant.

Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia is eyeing to attract 100 million tourists a year by the end of the decade and take the number of religious visitors up from 17 million to 30 million by 2025.

To accommodate these visitors, the government is expanding tourism infrastructure, and relaxing religious restrictions to make the country a more open and diverse destination for Western visitors and religious tourists alike.

In July this year, MBS announced to create a new national airline and pledged to invest over USD 147 billion in transportation infrastructure over the next nine years.

The kingdom is also looking at plans to construct a new airport in Riyadh, reports said.

Saudi’s efforts can be seen in the megaprojects it is undertaking. The Red Sea Development Company, a firm owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), is building 50 hotels and 1,300 residential units along the country’s Red Sea coast as part of an eco-friendly coral reef resort.

The PIF is also investing in a 334 km entertainment capital and the USD 500 billion zero-carbon desert megacity NEOM, which is the centrepiece of MBS’s economic transformation plans.