“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess anything”
Ronald H. Coase
One of the goals of the Saudi Vision was to reach 100 million tourists by the year 2030.
In 2023, they reached that target. 7 years ahead of schedule.
When I first saw these numbers, I was a bit baffled (not for jealousy purposes). How did they reach that number knowing that pilgrimage to Mecca is capped at ~20 million (for locals and outsiders). Did 80 million tourists visit Al Ula already?
No. Turns out, out of the 100 million, 79.3 million of those tourists came under “domestic tourism” (~80%)
Apparently domestic tourism is a thing according to the official UN definition
Domestic tourism is a giant that most economists and policy makers are ignoring1.
According to UN data, China has over 3 billion domestic tourists, followed with the US’ 2 billion.
Back to Saudi: according to data from the Ministry, in 2022, our neighbour had 77.84 million domestic tourists.
Looking at the “Purpose” category, only 8 million of those “domestic tourists” travelled for “religion” purposes while 29 million for “leisure”.
31.8 million travelled for VFR: Visiting Friends & Relatives. Yes… visiting friends and relatives…within the same country. That counts as tourism… visiting friends and families (who at least live in another city).
Definition from IRTS 2008 (ibid):
But when we look at Jordan’s number, we only get International Arrivals. Domestic tourism isn’t accounted for.
Why isn’t the Ministry of Tourism (MoTA) and Department of Statistics (DoS) in Jordan aggregating these numbers like everyone else!?
Missing Piece of the Puzzle
2023 was a record shattering year for Tourism in Jordan 🇯🇴.
Petra exceeded 1 million visitors, breaking the previous record set in 2019.
Jordan welcomed 6.3 million international visitors. 25% of those were Jordanians residing abroad2, coming back to visit friends and family. This is part of the VFR discussed above, but for international arrivals, not domestic.
So how can we get the total domestic tourism numbers?
Unfortunately, MoTA numbers only accounts for the “Urduna Jana” program in their domestic tourism stats (136,271 in total for 2023).
But we can try to figure out the other numbers ourselves.
For 2023: 1,195,762 Jordanians visited various sites, with Ajloun Castle 🏰 taking top rank (how many of them were Jordanians from abroad or local, no one can tell! It seems the UN themselves don’t care for double counting and duplicates in their statistics.)
Now we are deep in speculation territory: hotel occupancy rate was 37% for 2023 nationwide. For Aqaba and Dead Sea (total rooms ~8000), it was around 50%3. Assuming 35% of occupants were Jordanians, that gives us around 800,000 visitors. Total visitors to RSCN sites were around 200,000 in 20224. Assuming 50% were Jordanian: 100,000. Let’s assume the same for 2023.
Total domestic tourists for 2023 to add to the above total: ~2,1 million.
Also, the above number doesn’t include day trips, those who take the car and go camping/picnicking in nature, or someone coming from Irbid and discovering Abdali Boulevard for the first time. Apparently we should be including those.
The DoS tried to do that back in 2012 but then stopped5.
Their number for domestic tourist who took ‘tours’ (or trips/رحلات) was 4 million in 2012.
The total number still feels small compared to the population size. The ratio of domestic tourists/local population for Saudi & China is 3. I’m sure the number is bigger for 🇯🇴: the last trip taken up north made me feel like all of Jordan was in that 1 spot6.
In fact, we did miss the most important category: VFR (all above were for Leisure purposes). For example going to see parents in Kerak during the weekend. In my opinion, this data is unquantifiable.
In the End…
2023 saw 6 million tourists coming from abroad. Maybe in that same year, that number of domestic tourists reached 6 million (including leisure + “tours”) . Maybe in total we reached more than 12 million tourists (international + domestic tourism not including VFR). Or maybe it would best for the UN to remove VFR as a sub category for domestic tourism.
What matters is that even if we don’t count those trips to see friends and family, or picnic trips to nature, at least we should make sure our country stays clean.
Previous posts:
-Publicly listed Hotels in Amman Stock Exchange part 1, part 2, part 3
“Cinderella category, unrecognised or marginalised in planning and research terms, compared to the big, ugly sisters of leisure and business tourism, regarded as tourism's main money spinners” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0261517716302084
A disputed category by some: https://albaladnews.net/article/226976
Page 24 of Annual Report: https://www.rscn.org.jo/uploaded_files/media-center/annual-report/6491687dbcec41687251069.pdf
2013 paper by USAID showed that domestic tourists took 4.5 million trips but spending only 1.3 JOD/trip 🙃