Originally Posted by
lamphs
I went to the embassy open house event in DC last weekend and my first stop was the KSA embassy. Saudia had a nice display table and I asked the rep about tourist visas for US citizens. He had no helpful information. I then asked an embassy rep and he told me that 'something may be available in 2019', but he had no further information.
Yeah, they're always about vague or abrupt announcements depending on how politically beneficial it is for them. They usually wait for something bad to happen on their part, followed by announcing something positive to "balance" things.
They first announced something late 2017 and said that tourist visas would be issued in April 2018. Obviously, that wasn't the case, and since then some officials have unofficially stated the names of countries that would qualify for tourist e-visas, but there's no telling what the list of countries will actually be or when they'll start issuing visas.
From a technical sense, they
should be ready to issue them in 2019 since they tested the event e-visas two or three times now.