The forthcoming Unified GCC Tourist Visa represents one of the most concrete steps yet toward functional regional integration in the Gulf. While often compared to Europe’s Schengen system, the initiative is best understood as a targeted response to a long-standing structural problem: bureaucratic fragmentation that discourages multi-country travel in a region that increasingly markets itself as interconnected. Under the new framework, visitors would apply once through a unified digital platform and gain access to all six GCC states, namely the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait, on a single short-stay visa. Current planning points to a 30-day validity period, with a projected fee in the range of $90–130. The intent is to facilitate multi-destination itineraries that have so far been constrained by separate national visa regimes. This shift aligns directly with the region’s economic diversification strategies, where tourism has emerged as a critical non-oil growth sector. By lowering administrative barriers, the GCC is effectively repositioning itself as a single interlinked tourism space, rather than six adjacent but disconnected markets. Why the launch has taken time The repeated postponements of the unified visa’s rollout reflect not a lack of political commitment, but the complexity of aligning security […]