Hard, Green, and Heritage Infrastructure and Regional Tourism Spending in Saudi Arabia: Insights for Vision 2030 and SDG 11

ABSTRACT Tourism is a central pillar of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, with major investments in transport, urban regeneration, green spaces and cultural heritage. Yet little is known about how different dimensions of infrastructure jointly relate to the geography of tourism spending across the Kingdom's regions. This paper develops composite indices of hard tourism infrastructure, green infrastructure and cultural‐heritage infrastructure for the 13 administrative regions of Saudi Arabia using 2024 data from official national sources. It then examines how these indices are associated with regional tourism spending, controlling for population size and household income, and explores the spatial heterogeneity of these relationships through cluster analysis and an exploratory geographically weighted regression (GWR). The findings reveal a strong concentration of tourism spending in a small number of core regions, contrasted with a more even distribution of heritage and green assets. Population consistently emerges as the main driver of aggregate tourism spending, whilst infrastructure and heritage indices help to differentiate regional profiles and highlight untapped potential in several heritage‐ and nature‐oriented regions. The study contributes to debates on sustainable tourism and urban development by integrating hard, green and heritage infrastructure into a single analytical framework aligned with Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11). It discusses the implications for territorially differentiated tourism strategies and for monitoring the localization of SDG 11.4 and 11.7 within the broader Vision 2030 agenda.