(GCC Statistical Center): 75.7 million tourists visited GCC countries in 2025
Muscat, Aug 31 (KUNA) -- The Director General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Statistical Bureau, Intisar Al-Wahabi, said on Monday that the Gulf states received approximately 75.7 million tourists in 2025, with visitor spending reaching about $131.9 billion.
This was stated during the eighth regional workshop on innovation in tourism statistics, organized by the Bureau in Muscat under the theme “Data Integration and Trend Analysis,” as part of efforts to enhance joint GCC statistical work and highlight the economic and developmental role of the tourism sector.
Al-Wahabi added that the total economic contribution of the tourism sector in the Gulf states amounted to approximately $254.7 billion, pointing to several tourism indicators that reflect the scale of transformation the sector has undergone in the GCC countries in recent years.
In this regard, she noted that the sector’s economic contribution grew at an annual rate of 7.3 percent between 2019 and 2025, surpassing the global growth rate of 6.7 percent. She emphasized that the tourism sector in the Gulf states is experiencing “continuous growth and holds a prominent position” within national development plans and strategies.
In this context, Al-Wahabi said that Gulf tourism has strengthened its position on the international tourism map, with the GCC countries accounting for about 5 percent of international tourist flows, compared to 6.9 percent of global tourism revenues. She added that these indicators reflect a tourism presence in terms of value and revenue that exceeds its share of tourist numbers, noting that this growth coincided with the average progress in implementing the GCC Tourism Strategy reaching 73.8 percent by 2025.
Regarding the importance of tourism statistics, the GCC official affirmed that they have become a fundamental tool for measuring the sector’s economic contribution, analyzing its trends, and supporting public policies and investment and development decisions. She stressed that this rapid growth requires a sophisticated statistical system capable of keeping pace with its transformations and accurately measuring its contribution.
She further noted that with the multiplicity of data sources, including statistical surveys, administrative records, digital sources, and alternative sources, “the challenge is no longer merely the volume of available data, but rather how to integrate them, verify their quality, align their concepts and classifications, and transform them into timely, reliable, and usable information.”
The two-day workshop is attended by officials and 30 specialists in tourism statistics production from the statistical agencies of the GCC member states. It aims to introduce the concept of data integration and multi-source statistics, highlight its importance, identify tourism data sources, assess their suitability for statistical use, understand data exchange requirements, and explore methodologies for linking, matching, calibrating, and reconciling results.
The workshop also seeks to evaluate the quality and consistency of produced statistics and to leverage integrated data in analyzing trends and forecasting tourism demand.
The session will discuss several topics, including the challenges of relying on a single source in producing tourism statistics, the tourism data source system, and the legal, institutional, and technical requirements for data exchange, as well as integration methodologies that enhance the quality, consistency, and comparability of statistics among GCC countries.
The GCC Statistical Bureau, headquartered in the Sultanate of Oman, was established in 2011 to serve as the official authorized body for data, information, and statistics related to the GCC countries, in addition to its role in enhancing statistical and informational work among national statistical centers and planning authorities within the member states. (End) M.J.B. / N.W.F.
