HOW TO GET IN.....

My Kingdom will survive only insofar as it remains a country difficult to access, where the foreigner will have no other aim, with his task fullfilled, but to get out. -- King Abdul Aziz bin Saud, c. 1930


Saudi Arabia has some of the most restrictive travel policies in the world, and advance visas are required for all foreigners desiring to enter. The only important exception are residents of the Gulf Cooperation Council nations. Nationals of Israel and those with evidence of visiting Israel will be denied visas, although in theory merely being Jewish in and of itself is not a disqualifying factor. Saudis prefer not to grant visas to unaccompanied women, but work permits are common in some fields (esp. nurses, teachers, maids) and possible for anyone if your sponsor has enough connections.

However, things have loosened up a little compared to the past. Tourist visas, long near-impossible without a Saudi sponsor, are now available but only for guided tours. Transit visas are limited to some long-distance truck drivers. Hajj (pilgrimage) visas are issued by the Saudi government through Saudi embassies around the world in cooperation with local mosques. Hajjis, and those on transit visas are prohibited from traveling freely throughout the kingdom. Most short-term Western visitors to Saudi arrive on business visas, which require an invitation from a local sponsor which has been approved by the Saudi Chamber of Commerce. Once this invitation is secured and certified, the actual process of issuing the visa is relatively fast and painless (usually under a week, sometimes even on the same day). Getting a work visa is considerably more complex, but usually your employer will handle most of the paperwork.
The fun doesn't end when you get the visa, since visas do not state their exact expiry date. While the validity is noted in months, these are not Western months but lunar months, and you need to use the Islamic calendar to figure out the length: a three-month visa issued on "29/02/22" (22 Safar 1429, 1 March 2008) is valid until 29/05/22 (22 Jumada al-Awwal 1429, 28 May 2008), not until 1 June 2008! Depending on visa type, the validity can start from the date of issue or the date of first entry, and multiple-entry visas may also have restrictions regarding how many days at a time are allowed (usually 28 days per visit) and/or how many days total are allowed during the validity period. This all results in fantastic confusion, and it's not uncommon to get different answers from an embassy, from your employer and from Immigration!

If you have a work visa, exit visas are required to leave the country. (Business, tourism or Hajj visas do not require exit permits.) You cannot get an exit visa without a signature from your employer, and there have been cases of people unable to leave because of controversy with employers or even customers. For example, if a foreign company is sued in Saudi for non-payment of debts and you are considered its representative, an exit visa may be denied until the court case is sorted out.

Saudi Arabia has very strict rules for what may be imported: alcoholic beverages, pork, non-Islamic religious materials and pornography (very widely defined) are all prohibited. Computers, VCR tapes and DVDs have all been seized from time to time for inspection by the authorities. In general, though, inspections aren't quite as thorough as they used to be and while bags are still x-rayed, minute searches are the exception rather than the rule.

By plane
Saudi Arabia has 3 international airports at Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. The airport at Dhahran is now closed to civil traffic, so passengers to the Eastern Region now fly into Dammam.
Saudi Arabia is served by the national airline Saudi Arabian Airlines , often referred to by its Arabic name Saudia. Saudia has a reasonable safety record, but many of their planes are on the old side and the quality of service, inflight entertainment etc tends to be low. Foreign carriers serving the country include Gulf Air, Alitalia, Air France, Lufthansa, PIA, Air India, KLM, Qatar Airways, Swiss and SriLankan. British Airways stopped service to the kingdom in March, 2005, but BMI now flies directly from London to Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. During the Hajj, numerous charter flights supplement the scheduled airlines.

For access to eastern Saudi Arabia (eg. Dammam, Dhahran), a popular option is to fly into nearby Bahrain and then cross into Saudi Arabia by car.

Foreigners living in Saudi Arabia can often get sensational discounts on outbound flights during the Hajj. Airlines from Muslim countries are flying in many loads of pilgrims, and do not not want to go back empty.

By bus
SAPTCO operates cross-border bus services to most of Saudi Arabia's neighbors and even beyond to eg. Cairo.

Probably the most popular service is between Dammam/Khobar and Bahrain, operated by the separate Saudi-Bahraini Transport Company (SABTCO). There are five services daily at a cost of SR50/BD5 and the trip across the King Fahd Causeway takes around two hours on a good day; see Bahrain for details.

By car
Automobile crossings exist on all the borders, although those into Iraq are currently closed. The eastern crossings to Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE are heavily used, all others rather less so.

By train
There are no railroads connecting Saudi Arabia with other countries, although in the North, you can still find bits and pieces of the Hejaz Railway that once led to Damascus.

By boat
Infrequent passenger ferries run once a week or less from Egypt, Sudan and Eritrea to ports in western Saudi Arabia. Slow, uncomfortable and not particularly cheap, these are of interest primarily if you absolutely need to take your car across.