THE ECONOMICS OF RELIGIOUS TOURISM (HAJJ) AND IT’S IMPACT ON THE SAUDI ECONOMY

Abstract

Tourism has contributed to the growth and development of various regions around the globe. In addition to the benefits, there are also challenges that have prevented nations from experiencing income-based growth that contributes to the nation. Religious tourism has been considered to be the most popular form of tourism in Saudi Arabia, especially the Hajj pilgrims. Thus, this work was done to analyze the relationship between religious tourism and its impact on the economy of Saudi Arabia.  In this work, the relationship was analyzed  by forecasting the growth of revenue from religious tourism in the Saudi economy. In this work, the data were collected from the General Authority for Open Data Statistics and were analyzed in terms of the time series forecast in order to predict the growth of religious tourism and the income of Hajj. This study has used and  compared 5 forecasting methods, which are Naïve method, linear regression method, two period moving average method, weighted moving average method, and exponential smoothing method. The findings of this work have shown that the Naive method has the least deviation. Furthermore, the results have shown that religious tourism of Hajj pilgrims has a positive impact on the economy of Saudi Arabia.

CCS Concepts

• Information systems➝Database management system engines   • Computing methodologies➝Massively parallel and high-performance simulations.