How Saudi Arabia Used TikTok to Build a Leisure Tourism Brand It Didn't Have Before 2019

Before 2019, Saudi Arabia did not have the global leisure-tourism brand it has today.

The country already had tourism activity: religious travel to Makkah and Madinah, heritage sites, domestic leisure, and the institutions that run them. What it did not have was international recognition as a leisure destination that a traveler in London or Jakarta would consider alongside Spain or Thailand. Vision 2030 set out to build that recognition. TikTok turned out to be one of the more effective tools available for building it.

Content tagged #VisitSaudi has passed 143.6 million views on TikTok. Habitas AlUla, a single resort, has generated 52.6 million views on its own since opening in 2021. When Visit Saudi pushed its 2025 summer campaign, it built a branded hub inside TikTok's own search bar rather than leading with billboards or television.

Few destinations have had to build global leisure-tourism awareness from as recent a starting point as Saudi Arabia has. That timing is the actual story here, more than any single number.

The idea circulating in marketing conversations, including inside Saudi and Gulf marketing circles, is that TikTok has become "the new search engine," especially for how travelers find experiences rather than destinations. The global data on that claim is more nuanced than the soundbite. The version of it that holds up, and that matters specifically for Saudi Arabia, is narrower and more useful than the headline version.

The Claim: What TikTok Actually Replaced

The idea traces back to a widely repeated line.

Fact: In 2022, a Google executive told a conference audience that "almost 40% of young people, when they're looking for a place for lunch, they don't go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram." The figure came from Google's own internal research on US users aged 18 to 24, and has not been independently replicated at that scale since.

Fact: An Adobe Express survey run in January 2026 found that 65% of Gen Z respondents said they use TikTok as a search tool of some kind. The same survey found the share who called it "more likely than Google" for search had narrowed since 2024, and Google remained the platform most consumers rated as effective for actually finding information.

SOOGK Analysis: Read together, these describe a division of labor, not a changing of the guard. TikTok did not take over the job of answering a direct question. It became the more effective tool for an earlier job: introducing a place or an experience to someone who had not yet formed a query about it. Google captures intent that already exists. TikTok can create curiosity before intent exists at all. That distinction, not a "TikTok beat Google" scoreboard, is the part of this story worth keeping.

It is also the exact part of the funnel a destination with no existing global reputation needs most, because a search engine cannot help a traveler who does not yet know what to search for.

Why the Timing Favored Saudi Arabia

A destination with decades of brand equity has less need to introduce itself. Its larger task is to be re-recommended.

Spain does not need TikTok to tell travelers it exists. Decades of package holidays, film, and word of mouth already did that work. Its marketing task in 2026 is closing the sale on a destination the world already has an opinion about.

SOOGK Analysis: Saudi Arabia entered the leisure-tourism conversation from a different starting point, and TikTok fit that starting point well. A print campaign or a national tourism board's owned channels struggle to introduce a country to people who were not already looking for it. An algorithmic feed does not have that constraint. TikTok's for-you page does not wait for a search query; it puts a video of AlUla's sandstone canyons or a Red Sea reef in front of someone who was scrolling for something else, achieving a kind of cold discovery that would have been difficult to reach through traditional destination marketing alone.

That is the mechanic behind #VisitSaudi's 143.6 million views. But that number needs to be read carefully. Views are not unique viewers. Views are not the same as awareness, awareness is not the same as travel intent, and intent is not the same as a booking. A hashtag total tells us the scale of exposure a topic received on the platform. It does not, by itself, tell us how many distinct people saw it, how many came away with a favorable impression, or how many acted on it.

The stronger evidence sits one layer down. According to TikTok's own published case study, Visit Saudi's branded search hub, its later and more targeted move, drove 1.5 million page views, 18 million engagements with campaign content, and a self-reported 1.2x uplift in organic search growth toward Visit Saudi's owned platforms. Those figures are narrower than the hashtag total, self-reported by the platform selling the campaign, and worth treating as directional rather than independently audited. But they measure something closer to actual funnel movement: a branded layer that caught a portion of a much larger audience at the moment curiosity turned into a search.

The Real Mechanism: Discovery, Expectation, and the Reputation Gap

The more useful way to think about "search" on TikTok is not as a faster Google. It is as the first link in a longer chain: discovery creates an expectation, the actual trip either confirms or contradicts that expectation, and the gap between the two becomes the destination's reputation.

A traveler searching Google for "AlUla" is usually looking for a fact: opening hours, ticket prices, flight routes. A traveler scrolling TikTok is being shown an experience, filmed by someone who was already there, before they knew to ask for one.

Saudi Arabia's approach combined creator-led discovery with an owned conversion layer: wide, distributed content from creators, resorts, and everyday visitors feeding volume into the top of the funnel, and Visit Saudi's branded search hub converting a portion of that curiosity into intent. That combination is closer to how a search engine actually functions, indexing broad content and surfacing the relevant slice, than how a tourism campaign has traditionally worked. It also creates more surface area to represent Saudi culture on its own terms: content that treats hospitality, family life, or a religious occasion as lived texture rather than as decoration tends to hold up better once a visitor arrives and compares it to what they saw.

The Next Build: Converting Awareness Into Delivered Experience

The clearest sign that Saudi Arabia's tourism strategy is working is that the constraint has moved from getting noticed to following through.

Saudi Arabia reported an estimated 122 million domestic and inbound visitors combined in 2025. That figure blends religious travel, domestic tourism, and international leisure visits, and the leisure share is the newest and smallest of the three. A 2019 statement from Seera Group, made when it launched Discover Saudi, put the leisure share of inbound trips at roughly 2%. That figure predates both the pandemic and the bulk of Vision 2030's tourism build-out, and SOOGK could not locate a more recent, comparably specific public breakdown; it should be read as a historical baseline, not a current figure. The pattern it described is still visible in more recent data: of the 29.7 million international arrivals recorded in 2024, most were pilgrims and people visiting family, categories distinct from leisure travelers choosing Saudi Arabia the way they might choose Portugal or Thailand.

The same logic applies to the places themselves. AlUla and the Red Sea sites are positioned as rare and fragile assets, and there is no evidence currently that either is being overrun. But the same discovery engine that can send a surge of demand toward a heritage site or a reef within weeks also makes capacity planning a more urgent question for destinations built around sensitive natural and cultural assets. Building the operator layer at a pace that matches demand is not only a revenue question. It is what allows growth in visitation without asking those sites to absorb demand faster than they can be managed responsibly.

Spain is a useful illustration of what that operator layer looks like once it matures, not a direct benchmark. Spain's travel agency and tour operator sector counted 9,640 businesses in 2025, the product of roughly six decades of company formation under market and regulatory conditions specific to Europe. SOOGK's prior reporting estimated Saudi Arabia's comparable inbound destination-management sector at a small fraction of that density, against an estimated need of several times its current size by 2030. Spain illustrates what decades of tourism-market formation eventually produce: a dense operator layer capable of absorbing demand generated by newer discovery channels. Saudi Arabia is building an equivalent layer on a compressed timeline, and under different conditions than Spain faced.

The SOOGK Take

TikTok did not become Saudi Arabia's search engine by replacing Google. It became a discovery engine capable of generating organic curiosity at a scale that would have been difficult and expensive to reach through paid distribution alone, and it did so for a destination that needed exactly that kind of introduction.

Saudi Arabia used the platform in a disciplined way. #VisitSaudi's reach, and the branded search hub that converted a measurable slice of that reach into intent, describe a tourism strategy that treated TikTok as infrastructure for a specific job: creating awareness where none existed. That job is now well underway.

The next chapter is not about winning more attention. It is about whether the destination-management companies, guides, and service infrastructure being built can keep pace with the expectations that digital discovery is now generating, and whether the actual visitor experience holds up against the expectations the content created. That is where reputation gets made or lost, repeated one trip at a time.

The transferable lesson is not about Saudi Arabia specifically, and it is not really about TikTok either. Algorithmic discovery has made it cheaper than ever for an unfamiliar destination to be found. It has not made it any cheaper to be believed twice. The gap between the expectation a video creates and the experience a visitor actually has is where a destination's reputation is decided, and no amount of reach on the front end changes what happens in that gap.

Figures on global TikTok search behavior are drawn from Adobe's Express consumer survey (January 2026, reported via Search Engine Journal) and a 2022 Google executive statement reported by TechCrunch and Nieman Lab; both are self-reported or internally sourced and should be read as directional. Saudi-specific figures are drawn from TikTok for Business' published Visit Saudi case study (self-reported by TikTok), reporting by Corq Studio on Saudi Arabia's influencer industry, and Seera Group's 2019 statement on the launch of Discover Saudi, reported by Arab News and Seera's own release. Visitor and arrival figures for 2024–2025 are drawn from public statements by Saudi officials, reported by Arab News, Gulf News, and Saudi Gazette. DMC supply and operator-density figures, and the Spain comparison, are SOOGK's own prior modeling and should be read as directional, not official.