Saudi Arabia holiday highlights, 8 days

Hi Paul

Thanks for your comments regarding your trip - we're always keen to know how each tour goes and receive feedback from our travellers.

This trip is specifically designed to be a more 'budget' trip in Saudi Arabia, where costs can be very high. We wanted to design a shorter, less expensive tour that was a little more accessible than our longer two week trip, and with that in mind, use mid range hotels for this trip. Unfortunately this level of hotel in Saudi Arabia does not commonly serve lunch or dinner - with tourism to the country being fairly new, the infrastructure hasn't always quite caught up with what western travellers might expect. However, we generally find that most of our travellers prefer to eat outside of hotels, so that they can see a little more of local life, and so up to now this hasn't been raised with us. I understand that the guide offered to take you out to local restaurants.

As you did a private version of this trip we should perhaps have discussed whether you wanted to change any of the hotels featured in the standard group tour itinerary, and I'm sorry we didn't do this.

I'm sorry to hear that some of the hotels did not have hot water - this doesn't sound ideal. We'll follow this up with our local team to see if this is a common problem and if so whether we need to look at alternatives.

This is a short tour which focusses predominantly in the key cities of Saudi, with a couple of nights in Al Ula. As such, it's a little more difficult to enact responsible travel policies than it might be in some other areas, but where possible we try to work with our local team in this respect. The fact that meals have to be outside of the hotels means that local businesses are able to gain more of a share of the income generated by tourists than they might otherwise be able to do so, and we employ locally based guides to direct income into these communities - although with Saudi being a wealthy country this isn't perhaps as much of an issue as it is in less developed countries. With the itinerary of this particular trip there aren't any opportunities to support local conservation in an environmental sense, and the wealth of the country means that tourist sites do not depend on the income generated by entrance fees for their maintenance, however the focus of international tourism in Saudi Arabia is helping to increase recognition that there is value in preserving the country's heritage, at the same time as it develops ultra modern projects elsewhere. We continually work with our local teams to see if we can identify any opportunities for increasing the responsible tourism aspects of our trips.

I hope that despite the disappointment with some of the hotels, you enjoyed the trip overall, and I do hope that we can help with your travel plans again in the future.