Demand before capacity: Syria's tourism rebound outpaces its infrastructure

Syria is beginning to get a glimpse of what post-sanctions tourism demand could look like, but that demand has arrived ahead of the industry meant to serve it. Decisionmakers are left with a tight balancing act between promoting tourism and working around infrastructure and external bottlenecks that cannot yet handle a fast boom.

The rebound is coming off a low base but is also expanding beyond the previous base that was primarily composed of Syrians returning to see family. Visitor numbers more than doubled y-o-y in 1H 2026 to 3.52 mn visitors, according to Tourism Ministry figures, which include Syrian expatriates, Arab visitors and non-Arab foreign tourists. The biggest increase came from non-Arab foreign tourists, whose numbers jumped 448% to around 719k. Arab visitors rose 107% to 664k, while visits by Syrians living abroad increased 75% to 2.13 mn.

As the numbers boom, the country has fewer than 20k hotel rooms to accommodate this influx of visitors. Many of its four- and five-star hotels have no website, international card payments were switched back on only weeks ago, and Western governments still advise against travel. The Tourism Ministry is managing the recovery as much by restraint as by promotion.

The constraints sit on three clocks. Rooms can be added within a year by upgrading stock that already exists. Digital booking and payments infrastructure will take longer. Travel advisories and the reconnection of Syrian banks to international networks are outside Damascus’ control entirely.

What’s fueling the rebound: Syrians abroad are returning in much larger numbers after years in which travel home was difficult, helped by the reopening of Syria’s land borders. Reopened land crossings have made travel easier for Arab tourists. Independent Western travelers, bloggers and adventure tourists are making content from Syria.

Local businesses’ toolboxes are growing

“Damascus is booming,” Ninwa Hanna, a Syrian-American destination development consultant who advises the Syrian Tourism Ministry, tells EnterpriseAM. “A lot of diaspora Syrians have returned and opened businesses in Damascus — there’s an all-women’s Pilates gym that opened, there’s a ton of little cafes and F&B.” These businesses now also have access to many tools that previously weren’t within reach, including social media access, Hanna says. “Promoting your business on social media was next to none. And now, all of a sudden, they have the tools.”

Rami Nawaya, co-founder of Damascus-based tour startup Syrian Guides, is having a busier-than-ever fall season. His weekly group tours, which he markets to Western, English-speaking tourists, are filling up fast after a few months of cancellations linked to security fears due to the Iran conflict. “This month alone, there is unprecedented demand. We are trying to hire more tour guides to work on our tours, but everyone is booked,” he tells EnterpriseAM.

Historic sites that were largely empty during the war are now seeing visitors again, while restaurants, shops, and other businesses that had disappeared are reopening around the tourist trade, Nawaya says. Syrian Guides is now able to bring tourists into Syria through Damascus Airport, as well as overland from Jordan and Lebanon, with group tours spanning Damascus, Aleppo, Palmyra and Bosra.

The coast is bustling just as much as the urban centers. At the four-star Shahin Resort just outside Tartus, bookings have roughly doubled from last year, the resort’s PR executive Samer Shalhoum tells EnterpriseAM. All 261 of the resort’s rooms are currently in use, with another roughly 200 rooms set to operate next year. And while the resort used to fill up mostly on the weekends, it has been close to full almost every day this summer, with guests booking around 20 days to a month ahead. The resort has been full since mid-June and expects to remain booked through late September, Shalhoum tells us.

The clientele is changing, too. Alongside returning Syrians, Shalhoum is seeing guests with European and US passports, as well as visitors from Jordan and the Gulf. European visitors make up the largest share of its foreign clientele.

The surge in demand is exposing the extent of Syria’s hotel-room shortage. The country has fewer than 20k hotel rooms nationwide, with roughly 60% of the stock concentrated in one- and two-star properties, according to Tourism Minister Mazen Salhani.

The one-year clock: Squeezing capacity out of what exists

Operators are already turning business away: Nawaya says he has declined commissions from other tour operators looking for accommodation in Damascus. “Because the number of beds in the Old City of Damascus is so limited, these hotels are already fully booked,” he says.

The government is trying to squeeze more capacity out of the existing stock while larger projects wait to materialize. A government program is targeting 332 one- and two-star hotels with a combined 10k keys. The scheme offers financing on favorable terms through the National Islamic Bank, alongside technical support to help operators upgrade their properties. It is a short-term means of expanding usable capacity without waiting for new-build projects.

The upgrade program is the fastest clock. The new-build pipeline is the slow one, and it has yet to produce much. The government announced around USD 1.5 bn in tourism investments in 2025, covering hotels, resorts, entertainment projects and historic sites. But the figure includes both investment contracts and memoranda of understanding, and little of that investment has yet translated into projects on the ground.

In April, the government terminated the contract with Saudi Arabia’s Le Park Concord for the Seven Gates project, formerly the Sheraton Damascus, after the investor failed to meet most of its contractual obligations. The Beaumont Damascus project, meanwhile, only moved into the execution phase this month after obtaining its development and real-estate investment license. The project, being developed by Saudi Arabia-based Ezdihar Group, has an estimated investment value of USD 250-300 mn.

The longer clock: Finding (available) hotel rooms

Rooms are the visible constraint. The harder one is that a visitor abroad often cannot find a Syrian hotel, let alone book it. Burhan Alz’ibi, founder of newly launched tourism platform Dalil Syria, says the country’s digital tourism infrastructure remains years behind the demand now emerging. “It was shocking to me that a lot of famous hotels, four- and five-star hotels in Syria, do not have a website until now,” he tells EnterpriseAM.

Dalil Syria is trying to fill part of that gap by bringing hotels, heritage houses, guesthouses and other accommodation into a searchable digital directory, but Alz’ibi says the broader problem is bigger than discoverability. “The demand has increased much faster than the fragmented tourism ecosystem can offer or can support until now,” he says. “In my opinion, it’s the digital infrastructure. This is a major factor that can discourage visitors.”

The government is backing projects aimed at improving digital connectivity. The My Syria app launched in July as an integrated digital platform for tourism, hospitality and lifestyle services. Developed by UAE-based 121 Living for Property Management, it allows users to access tourism and hospitality services and make cross-border digital payments through Apple Pay, Google Pay and major international payment cards. The government also signed an agreement earlier this year with Saudi tech firms Tamkeen, Cipher and Hawaz to support the digital transformation of the tourism sector. The impact will depend on broader improvements to internet access, electronic payments and the ability of hotels and tour operators to connect to the new platforms.

Payments compound the issue: Visa and Mastercard carried out their first international card transactions in Syria in late August, more than 15 years after the country’s payments system was cut off from the global networks and following the US removal of Syria from the state terrorism sponsor designation. The reconnection remains limited, with no nationwide rollout yet.

For tour operators, that problem presents a genuine hurdle to business. Nawaya says Syrian Guides cannot reliably take deposits from overseas customers before they arrive, leaving them to collect payment in cash once tourists are in Syria. “For the tourists too, to carry a large amount of USD is a danger because this amount could get lost or stolen,” he says.

The clock Damascus cannot wind forward

In March, Syria made a comeback at Berlin’s ITB, the world’s largest annual tourism industry fair. Manaf AlHalabi, who lives between Syria and Germany, was among the exhibitors. He is hoping to revive his family’s tourism agency, which has been arranging tours for German tourists to Syria since the 1980s but went out of business during the war.

“We received a lot of interest in Syria. It is gaining a nice image, not one of war and asylum,” AlHalabi tells EnterpriseAM.

Germany, the UK, Canada and the US continue to advise against travel to Syria, making European and North American tour companies reluctant to sell the destination even as individual travelers begin returning, AlHalabi says. “The actual return of tourism needs an entire system. You need flights, hotels, transport, services, electronic payment, for example, marketing, trained staff, integrated tourism experiences. All of this is on the way, but to the companies we deal with, it is still a long way,” he says.

That gap between interest and capacity is why the ministry is promoting cautiously. “They are still cautious with promotion because the infrastructure doesn’t support even the tourists who are already arriving,” Nawaya says.

Alz’ibi expects tourism numbers to continue rising in the near to medium term, but says the pace will depend on improvements to the infrastructure supporting visitors. “If things stay on the same level, I think there will still be an increase, but not a significant one,” he says.

The demand will keep coming whether or not Damascus markets for it. The question facing the ministry is how much of it the system can absorb before the experience starts working against the image.