Hopping between Gulf countries could soon be as easy as traveling through Europe’s Schengen Area: just flash your passport at the entry point and seamlessly travel from one country to the next—no extra paper work required.
Six countries in the Persian Gulf region recently agreed to create a shared visa for travelers, meaning foreign tourists would need just a single passport visa to enter all six of the neighboring nations.
The participating countries include the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar—meaning tourists could soon visit Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE, see Saudi Arabia’s ancient city of Diriyah or the intricately hewn sandstone tombs at Hegra, and camp bedouin-style in the Qatari desert all in one fell swoop—without the bureaucratic headache of multiple visa applications. The only Gulf country to not participate in this is Iraq.
These six nations already have close ties, and together make up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a regional union that cooperates on certain economic and governance matters. The current GCC president, Sayyed Hamoud bin Faisal Al Busaidi, first announced that the council had approved the joint visa plan back in November 2023. Now, officials estimate the new multi-nation visa could launch as soon as later this year or early 2025.
The joint visa could help increase international tourism to the countries, “especially to Bahrain and Kuwait as well as Oman, which currently do not offer direct flights from and to the US,” says Amalia Lazarov, a travel specialist at Travelicious who plans luxury trips through the Gulf nations.
Currently, each country has a range of visa policies for American tourists. In Qatar and Kuwait, US leisure travelers can apply for a free visa on arrival, while Saudi Arabia requires American tourists to pay a fee of about $128. Bahrain and Oman also grant free visas on arrival to Americans, but they’re only valid for two weeks (the US State Department advises tourists to apply for them online before travel).
The majority of the six countries have undertaken a concerted effort to grow tourism numbers in the past few years. Saudi Arabia, for instance, opened its borders to international tourists for the first time in 2019, while Qatar’s tourism industry was turbocharged when it hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2022. Both of these milestones have brought a flurry of high-end hotel properties and other tourist infrastructure projects, including luxury trains through the desert, new cruise terminals, and ambitious conservation projects. Meanwhile, travelers have never been more interested in visiting the UAE city of Dubai, which hosted a record-breaking number of tourists last year: More than 17.1 million travelers visited the sprawling metropolis in 2023.
Because they offer advantages for both travelers and the destination, joint visa policies seem to be growing in popularity. Aside from the Gulf nations’ plan, a similar idea was floated among six nations in Southeast Asia earlier this spring. That effort, which the prime minister of Thailand unveiled in April, would allow travelers a single visa to enter Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, and Myanmar.
