Saudi Arabia to offer 250,000 jobs during Expo 2030: Minister

Al Khateeb, on the sidelines of the exhibition, added that the Kingdom will provide 1,000 hotel rooms. 

The Kingdom managed to offer nearly 250,000 job opportunities during the last four years, reaching 850,000 currently, compared with 600,000 jobs offered since the launch of the National Tourism Strategy in 2019, the minister said in a panel session at the first edition of the Global Labor Market Conference held in Riyadh. 

He added that the goal is to reach 1.6 million jobs and increase the contribution of tourism to 10% of GDP by 2030, indicating that the exhibition will provide 250,000 sustainable jobs. 

The local tourism sector is absorbing jobs as jobs lost by other sectors are monitored to be replaced by jobs in the sector, Al Khateeb said, noting that jobs in the sector do not require great skills and that it is easy to provide training courses to improve the skills of workers. 

The sector is focusing on the humanitarian aspect as it plays a pivotal role in sharing cultures, the minister said. He added that the Kingdom is keen to preserve the human element to transfer cultures between nations and aims to digitize unimportant jobs. 

Al Khateeb recently said the tourism sector contributes 8% to Saudi Arabia’s GDP, predicting the number of non-Saudi tourists to be near 26 million this year and 70 million by 2030, according to data available with Argaam.