Strategic Management of the Tourism Sector in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The Vision 2030 of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is to diversify the economy from over reliance on oil and focus on public sectors like tourism. The implementation of tools and techniques of strategic management in the kingdom’s tourism sector could help in accomplishment of this goal. Strategic management is the formulation of strategies in order to meet a firms long terms goals and objectives. The tourism sector is facing a dynamic and complex environment because of macro trends like terrorism, politics, global warming and etc. Therefore, it is important that firms and leaders should be equipped with the right strategic management tools and techniques that can help them in analyzing environment in which they operate and be able to make strategic decisions in order to have a competitive advantage. This study analyze the case for strategic management in tourism and gives a description on the both the external and internal environments of firms. In addition, it proposes three strategies: Business level strategy, corporate level strategy and Network level strategies that can be used by firms to be successful. It ends up by discussing the very crucial topic of strategy formulation and implementation and concluded the five approaches of strategy formation. This results and information provided by this study can help any touristic firm in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia to apply strategic management concepts which were originally developed for the manufacturing industry in order to analyze their environment and formulate long terms goals and objectives.