When my Saudi Arabia Travel Story was published online last week, some readers were alarmed.
Why, they wanted to know, had the New York Times travel team devoted so much time and effort to a country whose authoritarian government has committed serious human rights abuses? Why was the kingdom worthy of our attention? How much had the government paid us for our coverage?
The last question is the easiest to answer: Accepting money (or any other benefit) in exchange for coverage is strictly prohibited by The Times’ ethics guidelines. We just don’t.
But in the context of Saudi Arabia, I can understand why readers are wondering. In reporting the story, I learned about the incredible extent to which the Saudi government and its tourism officials paid online influencers—those on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—to visit the country and share oversimplified accounts carefully selected experiences. Such an arrangement creates incentives to focus on the positive aspects of the country and leave out anything that presents a more complex picture. And so social media is filled with glossy, one-sided content from the kingdom — which you may not realize because the arrangements that produce it are often not revealed.
In my opinion, this is one of the factors that justifies our independent article on Saudi Arabia’s new tourism projects: The Times is now one of the few outlets where curious readers — and potential visitors to Saudi Arabia — can to find a balanced travel story that acknowledges both the country’s profound changes and its continued complexity, including its troubling record of human rights abuses, religious extremism, and the oppression of women and LGBTQ people.
Why was the story commissioned in the first place? To put it simply: It’s remarkable. Saudi Arabia’s $800 billion approach to attracting tourists – by building massive infrastructure for non-religious visitors in a relatively short time frame – is unparalleled in its ambitions. Moreover, it is part of a broader set of goals to reform both the Saudi economy and its society at large.
We’ve been hearing about Saudi Arabia’s monumental efforts since 2019, when it began issuing the first tourist visas. This year, now that the coronavirus pandemic has subsided and more new tourist destinations are coming online, we thought it was a good time to check the progress.
For me, that meant taking a 5,200-mile road trip — alone, without a fixer or translator — that would bring me into contact with a wide swath of Saudi society. I wanted the article to reflect the country as a whole, not just its new construction projects. And I wanted to give a glimpse into the lives of everyday people. To achieve this, I visited many fancy resorts but did not stay the night in any of them. (Some cost well over $1,000 per night, ie way over the limit for a Times expense account.) Instead, I slept in shared campsites and booked rooms in budget hotels. My accommodations cost about $65 per night on average.
As for whether the realm deserves the attention of the Times: I’d say the realm warrants our scrutiny. To me, the word “deserve” implies an element of moral judgment, as if a Times article was intended as a stamp of approval. And judging whether we morally agree with news events or the people driving them is not part of the equation we use to determine what we cover. (By this logic, for example, people who committed atrocities might not “deserve” obituaries, even if they influenced the course of history.)
Ultimately, my job as a travel journalist is neither to convince nor dissuade anyone from visiting Saudi Arabia, nor to judge its society or tourism projects. My job is to explain what’s going on in the country as best I can, from the perspective of an informed traveller, and provide cultural and historical information to help put the current moment in a larger context.
So I tried to do just that — in a visually arresting story that I hope provides a fair and balanced portrait of a country undergoing profound change.
