The Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA), in collaboration with the Makkah Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI), started classification of hotels, furnished flats, and residential units, in accordance with the directives of His Royal Highness Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, president of SCTA. The involvement of MCCI in this context is to enhance the partnership with relevant authorities in the accommodation sector.

SCTA’s step comes within its efforts to achieve one of its most important strategies for developing tourism accommodation industry, in order to transfer it to a leading sector regionally and internationally. In this purist, it has been conducting frequent workshops and meetings during the past few weeks, attended by a number of investors and owners of the hotels and furnished flats.

The workshops and meetings aim to introduce mechanisms of classification of the accommodation sector in Makkah Al-Mukaramah and Al Madina AlMunawara to attendants, in view of the remarkable growth of specialized construction companies in Makkah alone. Noteworthy, SCTA had announced the conclusion of classification of the accommodation sector throughout the Kingdom, except for the two holy cities at that time, and classification was connected with pricing, which was remarkably hailed by investors and users of the accommodation facilities.

In Makkah, 37 hotels were classified as five stars, while pricing resolutions for the same category were 36. SCTA issued classification certificates to 13 hotels under the four-star category, followed by 8 price resolutions for the same category. Also, 45 classification certificates were issued at the three-star category, followed by 43 price resolutions. Sixty-nine classification certificates and 64 price resolutions were issued in the two-star category.