In January, we wrote that Saudi Arabia had lifted restrictions on women staying alone in hotels; previously, women had been required to stay with, or to carry a letter of permission from, a male “guardian.” So what’s come of it? The change has opened the way for a new niche hotel: the Luthan Hotel & Spa, which the executive director boasts is “women-owned, women-managed, and women-run.” But as the Christian Science Monitor’s Caryle Murphy asks, is this a sign of progress or of deepening gender segregation? 

Continue reading >>

Her “crime,” according to the Times of London: sitting with a man who was not her husband. She was hauled away by a member of Saudi Arabia’s Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The woman works for a company in Saudi Arabia and visited the Starbucks with male colleagues to use the Internet after their Riyadh office suffered an outage.

Continue reading >>

Facing criticism for its restrictions on women, the Saudi Arabian government said this week that individual Saudi women no longer need a male guardian to stay in a hotel or a furnished apartment within the Kingdom. However, hotels must send information about the traveler to local police, according to the AP. 

Continue reading >>

Oh, to travel like a Saudi prince. Or the wife of India’s richest man. I was driving home from Orlando’s airport a few days ago, having just booked a long haul flight in coach and already dreading the knees-in-my-teeth-feeling to come, when I heard an NPR segment about Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s purchase of his own personal A380 superjumbo jet (like the one pictured) to the tune of just over $300 million. According to an envy-inducing piece in the International Herald Tribune, the prince, worth an estimated $20 billion and the world’s 13th richest man, regularly travels with an entourage of around 50 people.

Continue reading >>

In June we blogged about one Western woman’s experience traveling under the abaya in Saudi Arabia. Now, Rajaa Alsanea’s debut novel, Girls of Riyadh, offers a look at the experiences of the women who spend their entire lives negotiating Saudi Arabia’s strict Islamic code. The book, which is being called “Sex and the City, Saudi-style,” was recently released in North America and the UK; it already boasts bestseller status in Germany and the Netherlands as well as a banning in Saudi Arabia itself.

Continue reading >>

As a woman, I relish the freedom of traveling alone but admit there are times and places where gender matters. Just last week, on my first trip to Vietnam, I found myself fending off aggressive touts and motorcycle taxis on every street corner in Hanoi while male tourists walked by unnoticed. An annoyance, but nothing on par with Los Angeles Times reporter Megan Stack’s experiences in Saudi Arabia. In a riveting story, Stack recounts, in very personal terms, the rising anger she felt at being treated as a “lesser being” during four years of covering the kingdom as the paper’s Cairo bureau chief.

Continue reading >>

An interesting brief Reuters story in today’s Guardian notes: “Saudi Arabia has lifted a ban on photography in public areas as part of an effort to attract more visitors. A royal decree allowing pictures to be taken in many public places was issued about a year ago and the interior ministry enacted it this week.” As before, travelers will still need permission to photograph people and private property.