Can Oman succeed in tourism? (page 3 of 3)

But if Salalah wants to start cornering the sun, sea and sand market, experts say that it must put more facilities in place to occupy people once they get there.

Good volume for 45 days is not enough to make profits, Samer Mashour, sales manager of the Hilton in Salalah said. We need to strive to make Salalah a 12-month destination, not just a summer getaway. Part of the solution appears to lie in a more concerted promotional campaign. We have instituted a host of services designed to increase the visibility of our hotel, such as online bookings, package deals, international sales offices and cooperation with European tourist agencies, Berg said.

But the government has to do more to assist the process. The government has also given signals that it intends to step up its efforts. The new ministry of tourism sponsored an ambitious census of traveler's to the Dhofar region this summer. By doing so they are identifying weekly numbers of travelers and sorting them by nationality.

The hope is that these statistics will provide promotional bodies with more specific data on the types of traveler's that come to Salalah in the summer. According to Sabir bin Said al-Harbi, director general of economic statistics at the ministry of national economy, there have been 62,838 visitors to Salalah since the Khareef Festival started on July 15th over 88 percent of them from GCC states.

Yet despite all these efforts, many say that the biggest single hindrance to realizing the full otential of tourism in the region is still the bureaucratic process. Decisions need to be filtered through a wide number of industries and organizations Ð ministries of tourism, information, commerce and industry, national economy along with the Royal Omani Police, aviation and immigration.

There has been progress in this area, but there is still work to be done. As with many sectors of the Omani economy, the building blocks for a successful industry are in place. Salalah has the natural beauty to become a world-class tourist destination.

But great foundations will get you nowhere without setting ambitious goals. The Khareef Festival in Salalah surpassed the 155,000 visitors that it got last year, and the overall summer numbers for the Dhofar region were also up by as much as 35 percent. But, as Jawad Sultan says, Oman has got to stop measuring itself by the progress it made the previous year. Its time for the sultanate to set a new standard for itself.