‘Quarantine hotels’ offer lifeline to Saudi hospitality industry

Travellers from abroad will have to undergo quarantine after arriving in Saudi Arabia.

Offering a ray of hope, however, the government is splurging millions of dollars to quarantine thousands of overseas travellers and those exposed to infected people in otherwise empty hotels around the kingdom. Nearly 1,900 rooms in hotels and other tourism facilities in Riyadh had been reserved for quarantine cases, along with more than 2,800 in Mecca and another 1,900 in the kingdom’s eastern region, the tourism ministry said on its website at the end of March.

Saudi football coach Abdulhakeem al-Tuwaijri told AFP his free-of-charge quarantine experience in Mecca after he returned with his team from a football training camp in Barcelona “beats any five-star hotel in Europe”. But the quarantine system has also seen complaints of misplaced luggage and food delays from some passengers who were hauled by authorities from Saudi airports to hotels without any prior warning.“Saudi Arabia is not a champion of human rights, but it is keen to show it is pampering people quarantined in hotels,” Quentin de Pimodan of the Research Institute for European and American Studies told AFP.

The announcement led to a rush to build new hotels, with officials at the time estimating 500,000 rooms will be required nationwide over the coming decade to fill the current infrastructure gap.

Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)

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