Oman has announced plans for a high-altitude destination at Jabal al Akhdar, combining mountain sports, wellness, and heritage tourism. The challenge: building three markets simultaneously in a place with no tourism history.
Oman’s Jabal al Akhdar sits at about 2,400 metres, cool enough in summer to be a different country from the coast. The government’s plan is to build a destination there around three markets: high-altitude sports training, wellness, and general tourism. The altitude is the product; the rest is what is built to sell it.
It is a characteristic Gulf project. A single authority can approve the resort, the road, the route, and the licensing in the same year, which is a power almost no European destination has.
The advantage is speed and coherence. The risk is the same thing. Five decisions taken at once are five decisions that can be wrong at once, and a new-build destination has no history to correct against.
A destination built for sports training needs a demand case for teams and federations: who would come, in which months, for how long, and what they would pay against the alternatives at similar altitude in Europe and Africa. A destination built for wellness needs a different case, from different markets, in different months. The two can share a site. They cannot share a forecast.
The altitude is the product. Everything else is what is built to sell it.
Demand by origin, season, and purpose, for each of the three markets, with the assumptions stated. The capacity the site can absorb before the experience that justifies the price is degraded. The route and road dependencies: a mountain resort three hours from the airport is a different product from one ninety minutes away, and the road is a decision the same government controls.
The counterfactual. Some of the wellness demand exists today and goes to the coast or abroad. The destination’s value is the part it adds, not the part it moves.
A government that controls every lever can sequence them. Approve the keys in the order demand will fill them. Time the route to the opening. Release the licences as the hotels open. Sized to a remembered peak, a resort at altitude sits empty for the months it was built for.
Jabal al Akhdar can be a genuine addition to the region’s visitor economy, because the altitude cannot be copied by a coastal competitor. That is a real advantage, and it is exactly the kind of advantage that gets over-built. The demand case, by market and by month, is the difference.
The method is on the pages for national governments and demand forecasting and vectorisation.
For further reading, see OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2024.
For a new-build destination, insist on a separate demand forecast for each market it claims to serve, by month. One combined figure means nobody has done the work.
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Oman has announced plans for a high-altitude destination at Jabal al Akhdar, combining sports training, wellness, and tourism at 2,400 metres. It is the kind of project a Gulf government can commit to at once, and the kind that lives or dies on a demand case nobody has yet published.
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The owners of the Bulls and the Blackhawks are putting a reported US$7bn into 55 acres around the United Center: housing, a music hall, a hotel, retail, a park. The arena already hosts more than 200 events a year. The question a developer should ask is what the other 165 nights are worth.
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