August nearly matches entire Khareef season a decade ago

SALALAH: An entire Khareef season brought 652,986 visitors to Dhofar in 2016.
Ten years later, an Observer calculation based on official cumulative figures puts the number recorded in August 2026 alone at 643,602.
The difference is just 9,384 visitors.
The comparison is not a conventional growth rate: one figure covers a single month and the other a full season. Rather, it illustrates how much the volume of people moving into Dhofar during the Khareef peak has grown over a decade.
Preliminary figures from the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI) put the number of visitors between June 21 and August 31 this year at 1,116,051, up 8.6 per cent from the corresponding period in 2025.
The total had already surpassed the 1,070,738 visitors recorded during the entire 2025 Khareef season, with September still outside the latest 2026 count.
Official figures show that the 2016 season attracted 652,986 visitors, with Omanis accounting for 70.5 per cent of the total.
A decade later, Omani travellers remain at the centre of Khareef — and they have driven nearly all of this year’s increase.
Dhofar received 88,796 more visitors by the end of August than during the same period last year. Of those, 82,494 were Omanis.
That means Omani travellers accounted for nearly 93 per cent of the net increase. The latest figures also underline how heavily Khareef traffic remains concentrated in August.
The Observer calculation, derived from the NCSI totals for the end of July and the end of August, puts August’s count at 643,602 — almost 58 per cent of everyone recorded since the season began on June 21.
The month was also substantially busier than a year earlier. August 2025 brought 585,155 visitors, 58,447 fewer than the calculated figure for August this year.
For Dhofar, the significance extends beyond another record.
Khareef brings lower temperatures, mist, drizzle and green landscapes to parts of the governorate while much of Oman and the wider Arabian Peninsula is experiencing intense summer heat.
That contrast has long drawn Omani and Gulf families south.
What has changed is the volume of movement compressed into the peak weeks. A volume of visitors that once accumulated over a full season can now arrive within a month, placing simultaneous demand on roads, parking areas, natural attractions, restaurants, accommodation and public services across the governorate.
Authorities had anticipated a heavy season.
Before Khareef began, Dhofar Municipality said its operational and service preparations were being developed around receiving approximately one million visitors.
That level had already been exceeded by more than 116,000 by the end of August. But the headline visitor totals do not show how the heavier peak was distributed among roads and attractions, how much additional pressure it placed on services, or how widely the resulting economic activity reached communities across Dhofar.
The economic picture is also incomplete.
Visitor expenditure during the 2025 Khareef season was estimated at around RO 124.6 million. Comparable figures for 2026 have yet to be released.
That distinction between visitor volume and local economic value has already emerged during this season.
Shaikh Tariq bin Khalid al Hinai, Wali of Taqah, told the Observer that success should not be measured by visitor numbers alone, but also by the difference tourism makes to the community and local economy.
For now, the scale of the change can be captured in one comparison:
In 2016, 652,986 visitors made an entire Khareef season. Ten years later, almost the same number arrived in August alone.