Oman welcomed 4 million inbound visitors in 2025, up from 3.9 million, and their spending crossed one billion rials — with an average stay of 6.5 nights, double the Gulf norm, and the UAE, India and Britain leading the source list.
The 2025 source map reads like Muscat’s flight board: the UAE supplies 17% of arrivals, India 12%, the UK 8%, Germany 5% and Bahrain 4% — a Gulf neighbor, a subcontinental giant and two long-haul European markets in the top five. Charter programs added 588 flights and 93,000 tourists worth some $80 million in the 2024/25 season, including the first direct Moscow–Salalah charters.
The ministry now runs tourism offices in China, Russia and Spain plus eleven representative offices covering 25 countries — the machinery behind a quiet push into new source markets. Early-2026 data shows the pattern holding: 2.152 million arrivals in January–July, flat overall but with tourist-visa entries up 6.9% — leisure growing, day-trip and business segments steady.
Omanis themselves are the market’s other half: 13.6 million domestic trips in 2025, up 5.1%, filling the mountain resorts in summer and the southern khareef coast when the capital bakes. Cruise adds another 137,330 sea arrivals a year, most of them through Muttrah.
The 2040 target — 12 million visitors a year — is deliberately un-Dubai. The strategy papers emphasize yield over volume: longer stays, higher daily spend, more of the country beyond Muscat and Salalah. A capital where the average guest already stays nearly a week is playing that game from a position of strength.
Four million sounds modest next to Dubai’s nineteen — until you see the 6.5-night average. Oman’s visitors come slower, stay longer and spend their week properly; that is the harder kind of tourism to build and the more durable kind to keep. Muscat’s arrival story is exactly as calm, and exactly as solid, as the city itself.
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