Can Bahrain turn out to be a vacationer hotspot?

Bahrain is an archipelago of 33 pure islands trimmed with white sand, off the Arabian Peninsula. Pre-pandemic, it acquired 4.three million annual vacationers, with neighboring nations Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) attracting round 15 million every. In 2019, the Bahraini tourism sector grew 6.8%, and the trade jumped from accounting for simply 2.4% of Bahrain’s GDP in 2015 as much as 7% on the finish of 2021, in keeping with the BTEA — which hopes to see that quantity rise to greater than 11% by the point these new initiatives are accomplished.

Nasser Qaedi, CEO of the BTEA, says Bahrain has capitalized on the tourism lull created by international Covid-19 journey restrictions through the use of this time to implement tourism infrastructure initiatives.

The developments at present underway encompass three large-scale initiatives: the Galali waterfront challenge, the Bahrain Bay challenge, and the development of the brand new Bahrain Exhibition Heart in Sakhir, which may have a footprint of over 300,000 sq. meters.

The plans characterize a push in the direction of positioning the nation as a seashore vacation spot. “We’re the one island state within the Center East,” says Qaedi. “That island waterfront id could be very vital to our price as a tourism vacation spot.”

File-breaking exhibition heart

Whereas Bahrain has lengthy been a well-liked vacation spot for vacationers from the Gulf, it’s going through challenges. Based on Magdalena Karolak, affiliate professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at a College within the UAE, Bahrain’s vacationer trade remains to be recovering from the mixed results of the Covid pandemic, and competitors from neighboring Saudi Arabia, which is linked to Bahrain by the King Fahd causeway.

“Saudi Arabia in 2019 began a marketing campaign that positively will have an effect on Bahrain. They began to give attention to opening up all kinds of leisure, corresponding to cinemas, procuring malls, resorts,” she says. Karolak provides that many Saudis who had prior to now traveled to Bahrain for the weekend to reap the benefits of extra relaxed social codes had been now selecting to remain at dwelling.

One other problem, in keeping with Karolak, is that “there may be little or no entry to seashores. On the primary islands, the seashores are both constructed up or they’re personal.” The event might go some approach to addressing that, because the Galali waterfront and Bahrain Bay initiatives alone will introduce greater than 2.6 kilometers of seashore to the coast.

Karolak believes that Bahrain’s exhibition heart shall be an asset to your complete Gulf, by attracting vacationers to the area. “When this exhibition heart is operational, I am certain it will likely be one thing that each one the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) nations, particularly Saudi Arabia, would additionally use and promote,” she says.

Qaedi is hopeful that the developments will provide advantages to Bahrain on each a micro and macro scale, drawing international monetary curiosity to the area and stimulating native economies with job creation and funding in native infrastructure.

“These developments are going to be sport changers for the nation,” Qaedi tells CNN. “We’ve got a holistic imaginative and prescient — it isn’t simply concerning the particular person initiatives, we’re linking all of them collectively, making a multibillion-dollar imaginative and prescient in the direction of a tourism trade that may turn out to be a key attraction for anybody visiting the area.”