Strip the Kingdom’s services trade to its parts and it is, on the export side, a travel account. Of the SR59.5 billion in services the Kingdom sold to the world in the second quarter, SR33.8 billion was travel: visitors spending in hotels, restaurants, transport and shops. That is 57 percent of the total, and nearly all of it, 94 percent, was personal rather than business travel. The General Authority for Statistics published the quarter’s services bulletin this week, and it is the cleanest available measure of what tourism policy earns in foreign exchange.
The headline figures moved in both directions. Services exports fell 4 percent from a year earlier and 16.5 percent from the first quarter. Services imports rose 8.4 percent on the quarter to SR120.8 billion. The services deficit came to SR61.3 billion.
The quarterly swing is mostly the calendar. Ramadan, and the Umrah traffic that concentrates in it, fell entirely within the first quarter this year, and travel exports duly dropped 23.6 percent from that peak in the second. A services ledger weighted toward pilgrimage and leisure will breathe with the religious and school calendars, which makes the year on year reading, down 4 percent, the better gauge of trend than the quarterly one.
Beyond travel, the export lines are thin. Transport earned SR10.5 billion, about 39 percent of it aviation. Telecommunications and IT earned SR2.6 billion, other business services SR2.4 billion, and no remaining category cleared SR2 billion. For all the growth in Saudi finance, logistics and technology, the Kingdom’s exportable services remain concentrated in one product: the visit. Diversification of services exports is, so far, a story about widening tourism rather than adding new columns.
The import side reads as the construction decade’s invoice. Transport services cost SR34.1 billion, 41 percent of it maritime, the freight bill for the Kingdom’s merchandise imports. Other business services cost SR18.8 billion, half of that professional and management consulting. Construction services added SR14.5 billion. These are the lines where the delivery phase of the giga-project program, the one on display at this week’s mega projects summit in Riyadh, is paid for: imported engineering, imported project management, imported expertise. Travel imports rose 17 percent on the quarter to SR25 billion as the summer holiday season began, almost all of it personal.
One symmetry in the national accounts stands out. The Kingdom’s goods surplus in the same quarter was SR61.5 billion. Its services deficit was SR61.3 billion. What the Kingdom earns selling goods abroad it currently spends, almost to the riyal, buying services: shipping, consulting, construction and its own residents’ travel. The tourism strategy is the plan for that gap, because travel exports are the one services line with the scale and the mandate to move it.
Official figures cited alongside the release put 2025 at 123 million visitors and SR304 billion in tourism spending. The third quarter print will carry the summer school holiday, which runs against the Kingdom on the import side, and the early autumn Umrah build on the export side. The longer test is whether lines other than travel begin to appear at scale, and transport is the one to watch first: aviation capacity, from Jeddah’s new terminal to Riyadh Air’s route map, exports services every time a foreign passenger boards.