Saudi Arabia tourism sector has a new chief executive. The Saudi Tourism Authority named Ageel Alshaibani as its Chief Executive Officer effective 2 September 2026, succeeding founding chief executive Fahd Hamidaddin, who had led the authority for seven years before leaving the post in May.
Alshaibani joins the Saudi Tourism Authority from the Ministry of Tourism, where he served as Deputy Minister for Strategic Planning and Monitoring. According to his professional biography, he brings nearly two decades of experience across tourism, government, consulting, finance and business development, including previous senior roles at Misk Foundation and McKinsey and Company. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance and a Master of Science in Marketing and Management.
Inheriting a fast growing but maturing market
Alshaibani takes over an authority that Hamidaddin, in the early years of the Vision 2030 tourism push, once described as the biggest start up in the world. Saudi Arabia recorded around 123 million domestic and inbound tourist trips in 2025, up roughly six percent year on year. Of those, 29.3 million were inbound visits and 93.3 million were domestic trips, while total tourism spending reached a record 304 billion Saudi riyals, with inbound visitors accounting for 176.6 billion riyals of that figure.
The scale of investment behind those numbers is substantial. Saudi Arabia had 385 hotel projects representing almost 105,600 rooms under development at the end of the first quarter of 2026, the largest hotel construction pipeline in the Middle East, spread across destinations including Riyadh, the Red Sea coast, AlUla, Diriyah and Qiddiya. Saudi airports handled 140.9 million passengers in 2025, an increase of 9.6 percent on the previous year, including 75.8 million international passengers.
From launch to execution
Where the Hamidaddin tenure was defined by introducing Saudi Arabia to the international travel industry, the Alshaibani task is described by industry observers as one of execution, converting a large hotel and aviation pipeline into sustained leisure demand, alongside the dominant religious travel segment of the Kingdom, as the sector works toward its wider Vision 2030 tourism targets. Much of that pipeline is concentrated on the Red Sea coast and at AMAALA, where resort brands have begun opening to guests after years of construction.
The Alshaibani appointment was announced days before Saudi Arabia hosted the inaugural WTM Spotlight Riyadh trade event, a gathering the authority has positioned as part of a shift from promoting the Kingdom abroad to convening the global travel industry inside the country itself. Some regional outlets have rendered the new chief executive name as Aqeel Al Shibani.
