Hatem Fakih, Head of Media, 5th Element. Ten years ago this spring, Vision 2030 was announced. A decade on, the ambition is no longer aspirational. The Kingdom crossed its original target of 100 million annual visitors six years ahead of deadline. It went on to close 2025 at 123 million visitors and has reset the horizon to 150 million visitors by 2030. The headline number is impressive, but the deeper story is bigger. Across the same 10 years, the marketing
ecosystem behind that growth has matured at the same pace as the destinations themselves.
The narrative work is largely done. AlUla earned its place in the global luxury imagination. Diriyah turned heritage into one of the country’s most visited districts. Qiddiya opened on New Year’s Eve with one of the world’s most ambitious theme park complexes.
Visit Saudi put the Kingdom on every traveller’s shortlist. What marketing leaders should now notice is that, in parallel, a sophisticated commercial layer has quietly stood up. Ninety-nine per cent internet penetration. Thirty-six million connected users. Digital ad spend at $4.68bn in 2026, climbing toward $8bn by 2029. Programmatic, retail media and e-commerce are all operating at scale.
If the first decade of Vision 2030 was about opening the Kingdom to the world, the second will be defined by how intelligently the Kingdom learns from it – and the operating layer of that intelligence is artificial intelligence (AI).
‘‘Market specialists, performance strategists and signal analysts must know the Kingdom’s audience the way a local knows a neighbourhood.”
AI is not a future capability in Saudi marketing; it is already the spine. The flagship example is SARA, the Saudi Tourism Authority’s AI-powered digital travel companion, launched at World Travel Market (WTM) London. Every conversation with SARA is intent data. Every preference she captures is a planning input. Around her sits a fast-maturing AI stack: predictive audience modelling, dynamic creative optimisation, generative Arabic-first creative produced at the speed of culture, and real-time decision-making that turns yesterday’s reports into today’s media buys.
The Kingdom’s distinctive advantage is that this adoption is happening alongside commercial scale-up, not after it. Saudi Arabia skipped the legacy stack and wired intelligence into the marketing system from day one.
Three signals tell the story of an ecosystem maturing in real time
First, first-party data is becoming an asset class. Every Visit Saudi search, every e-visa application, every SARA interaction and every booking is being treated as a marketing input. Destination marketers are building addressable audiences by season, by source market and by destination. That is what a mature tourism economy looks like.
Second, creative is becoming measurable. Saudi audiences reward Arabic-first storytelling tuned to Ramadan, National Day, Riyadh Season and regional dialects. AI is making that hyper-local fluency operationally feasible at scale, with dozens of culturally tuned variants tested against real conversion data rather than one hero film versioned for every market.
Third, attribution is catching up to ambition. At nearly $5bn in digital ad spend, full-funnel measurement is becoming the standard – from search to stay and from arrival to repeat visit. The same rigour retail media brought to e-commerce is now arriving in destination marketing. The tourism boards, hotel groups and giga-project teams that adopt it first will set the benchmark for the rest of the region.
This is why we at 5th Element built our practice on one belief: performance is no longer a channel; it is a posture.
Every signal counts: the watch session, the search query, the cultural moment, the contextual cue and the behavioural shift. Teams must read them in hours, not weeks, and act on them at the speed at which Saudi audiences move. That speed comes from people, not platforms.
Market specialists, performance strategists and signal analysts must know the Kingdom’s audience the way a local knows a neighbourhood. They must sense when a signal is shifting, and they must move with it. They must recalibrate creative, targeting and budget in real time. In a market this fast, instinct
is the edge.
Ten years ago, Vision 2030 set an ambition. Ten years on, the Kingdom has the destinations, the audience and now the marketing intelligence to convert that ambition into the next 25 million visitors. The first decade told the world Saudi Arabia is open. The second will show the world how smart its tourism economy can be.
By Hatem Fakih, Head of Media, 5th Element.
