When the Tourism Law was issued by Royal Decree 69/2023, it left the details to a regulation to be issued by the Minister of Heritage and Tourism. For roughly two years, the old 2016 Executive Regulation kept running in that gap. The gap has now closed, in April 2026 the Minister issued a brand-new Executive Regulation of the Tourism Law, which came into force on 17 April 2026 and replaces the 2016 text entirely. Businesses already holding tourism licences have six months to bring themselves into line with it.
The regulation organises the sector into six licences: operating or managing a tourist or hotel establishment; travel and tourism offices (and branches of foreign tourism companies); tourist guidance; adventure tourism; high art performance groups in hotels and restaurants; and business tourism. The last two stand out. Adventure tourism, everything from off-road desert driving and mountain trekking to caving, canyoning, and ziplining, now has its own licence and a dedicated annex listing exactly which activities are covered. Business tourism, meaning conferences, exhibitions, and corporate incentive trips, is recognised as a licensed activity in its own right.
Under the old regulation, if the ministry sat on a licence application for 60 days, that silence counted as a rejection. The new regulation flips this; the ministry has 60 days to decide, and if it says nothing, the application is deemed accepted. For a sector that lives or dies on getting projects open, this reversal is the most consequential single change in the regulation.
Tourist guiding in English remains reserved for Omanis. Guides are split into general, locational, and specialised categories, must keep groups to no more than 30 people at a site, and are barred from discussing politics or religion or from working in military, border, or customs zones without permission. Adventure tourism operators carry the heaviest safety burden: an Omani licence-holder, a security and safety audit certificate, insurance issued inside Oman, a licensed specialist guide on every trip, risk and safety management plans, and a duty to cancel outings when bad weather is forecast.
Several licence fees have actually come down; a five-star hotel licence now costs 1,900 Rial Omani for three years, against the previous 3,200 Rial Omani for five years. Establishments still collect a 4% tourism fee for the ministry and an 8% service charge, but the service charge must now be paid out to staff in cash. Administrative fines in the regulation are capped at 6,000 OMR.
You can read the new Executive Regulation of the Tourism Law in full in English on the link below: