Opinion: Why Boycotting Saudi Arabia Won’t Change It — But Visiting Just Might

There’s an article we’ve published about vacationing in Saudi Arabia.

This will hit different in different quarters.

So, having been a tourist in Saudi Arabia in the last couple of years, I figured I’d put a few thoughts down.

I'm all for boycotts. I haven't bought bourbon since the first Trump Administration. But you hear every once in a while of people calling for travel boycotts, and those, I wonder about. 

Sometimes it's about an especially brutish law having been passed, or human rights abuses, or maybe an environmental outrage or dictatorial regime.

But the one thing these boycotts have in common is that they're boycotts, the idea being to deprive the target of my trade, to make them hurt, at least a bit, like a low-voltage cow prod, so that they might sit up, take notice, and reassess.

But like I say, I wonder about the efficacy of travel boycotts.

There are, for instance, very few economies in the world that rely very heavily on tourism. Outside the warm island Nations of the world, it's vanishingly rare. For Portugal, which has the highest dependence of the large European economies, it's under 5%. For France and Italy, it's more or less 1%. So unless you want to force Aruba’s hand (43%), or wrestle the Maldives (38%) into submission on some issue, your travel boycott is unlikely to have a transformative effect.

But it goes further than that, it's the nature of the transaction itself. Unlike produce or booze, travel is not just a monetary exchange. 

If you were a woman in Qatar in 2012 and wore an off-the-shoulder blouse, you could expect to be ogled by men, and hissed at by women in the street. But when the emir announced that, by virtue of having won the 2022 World Cup, the population would have to tolerate foreign ways while maintaining their own, things changed almost immediately.

Tourists were coming, and things were going to change.

It’s an extreme example - and a lasting one, by the way - but it’s not categorically different from what occurs in other parts of the world that we, in our part of the world, are displeased by. I once half-jokingly wrote an article suggesting that the WorldPride should be held in Qatar, but the basic fact of the argument is no joke. Tourists bring values with them, and many tourists, with many different sets of values, tend to have a leavening effect on a place. It’s difficult to be stridently homophobic, or racist, or even anti-Western for that matter, when smiling people are milling about living their best lives among you, and dropping a few thousand here and there along the way.

So the idea of travelling to Saudi Arabia, home of 9/11, executioners of Jamal Khashoggi, forbidders of women drivers until recently, might seem like a no-brainer to some. Of course we don’t go. To others, it’s a no-brainer in the other direction. It’s a cool place, why wouldn’t you go? 

I think the answer, as it so often is, lies in between the two obvious points of view. We should go, we should bring as much of ourselves as we reasonably can, we should, in short, bear witness, be secular touristic missionaries to parts of the world we think extreme and unreasonable, rather than avoid them. We should order our coffees, asking for whatever nonsense foam request we make at home. We should smile and laugh and be as affectionate as local laws permit, wearing the things we wear, doing the things we do, and behaving the way we behave, whether we’re from Canada or Germany, Vietnam or Sri Lanka. 

The women will see. The gays will see. And above all, the kids will see. When I was there in 2023, I got stuck in a traffic jam of kids in Riyadh, leaning out their windows, flirting with each other, playing loud music in their souped-up cars, at 3am on a Wednesday. This is not the Saudi Arabia of 25 years ago. This is a Saudi Arabia that is, in its own way, reaching out into the world they see coming to visit. And those kids in those cars, flirting in their thobes and hijabs, as well as their jeans and t-shirts, they’ll have at least some of what they need to grow into a world of their own choosing.

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