Oman issued a new Executive Regulation of the Tourism Law in April 2026. It replaced the regulation that had governed the sector since 2016, and it gave every existing tourism licence-holder six months to bring their operation into line — a deadline that falls around late October 2026.
What changed in April 2026
The governing statute is the Tourism Law, Royal Decree 69/2023, issued 23 October 2023 and published in Official Gazette 1517 on 29 October 2023. It repealed the old Tourism Law, Royal Decree 33/2002.
The statute sat without its own executive regulation for two and a half years. That gap closed with Ministerial Decision 1152/2/1/141/2026, issued on 16 April 2026 by the Minister of Heritage and Tourism and published in Official Gazette 1645 on 26 April 2026. It replaces the 2016 Executive Regulation and cancels Ministerial Decision 124/2021, which had covered adventure tourism on its own.
Article 2 of the new regulation gives licensed operators six months from its effective date to align their operations with it. Counting from publication on 26 April 2026, that lands in late October 2026.
This applies to businesses that are already licensed, not only to new applicants. If you hold an MHT licence issued under the old regulation, your obligations have changed — insurance, guide engagement and fee handling in particular — and the ministry has not published a per-business notification process.
There is no Class A or Class B travel agency licence
This is the single most common error in English-language material about Omani tourism licensing. Consultancy pages routinely describe a tiered system — "Class A" for international ticketing, "Class B" for domestic — and set out different capital requirements for each.
No such tiering exists in the regulation. The Executive Regulation creates a single travel and tourism office licence with no grades, classes or tiers. Nor are "tour operator", "inbound and outbound tourism" or "tourist transport" separate MHT licence categories. They are descriptions of commercial activity, not names of licences.
Ask which article of Ministerial Decision 1152/2/1/141/2026 it comes from. There is no answer to that question, because the classes are not in the text.
The same applies to minimum capital figures for a travel agency. We found no Omani government source stating any minimum capital for a tourism licence, and the Foreign Capital Investment Law abolished the general minimum capital requirement.
The six licence categories
- Operation and management of tourist or hotel establishments
- Travel and tourism offices, including branches of foreign tourism companies
- Tourist guidance
- Adventure tourism — off-road driving, trekking, caving, canyoning, ziplining
- Fine and high art performance groups in classified establishments
- Business tourism — conferences, exhibitions, corporate incentive travel
A conventional travel agency selling tickets and organising trips needs category two. If you also run guided desert or wadi trips yourself, you are into category four as well, and the adventure tourism licence is issued and priced separately.
The travel and tourism office licence
Article 32 of the regulation sets the conditions for a travel and tourism office licence. They are administrative rather than financial:
- A valid commercial registration covering the activity
- A lease agreement or ownership deed for an operational premises — this is a licensed office, not a home or virtual address
- The documents specified in the ministry's guide for the service
- Payment of the licence fee, which is non-refundable
Two operating obligations matter more than the paperwork. Article 33 prohibits an office from engaging unlicensed tour guides. And the new regulation requires you to insure tourists against risks for the duration of the trip, and to give travellers comprehensive trip details including potential risks. Neither obligation existed in this form under the old regulation.
On timing, the ministry has 60 days to decide a licence application, and expiry of that period counts as implicit approval. Renewal must be filed at least 60 days before expiry; filing late attracts a penalty of 10% per month on the licence fee.
What the licences cost
| Licence | Fee | Validity |
|---|---|---|
| Travel and tourism office | OMR 75 | 2 years |
| Adventure tourism — organisation | OMR 100 | 2 years |
| Adventure tourism — operations | OMR 100 | 1 year |
| Hotel, 5-star and 4-star | OMR 1,900 | 3 years |
| Hotel, 3-star | OMR 1,450 | 3 years |
| Standard tourist camp | OMR 600 | 3 years |
These come from Appendix 1 of the new regulation. The hotel figures are reductions: five- and four-star licences were previously OMR 3,200 for five years, three-star OMR 2,400 for five years, and standard camps OMR 1,000 for five years. The OMR 75 travel office fee is unchanged and is separately confirmed on the gov.om service page and by Ministerial Decision 75/2022, which set it in 2022.
Tour guides, and the English-language rule
Tour guiding is not closed to foreigners in Oman. But the most commercially significant language is.
Article 36 of the Executive Regulation restricts tour guiding in English to Omani nationals. The licence itself specifies which languages the holder is authorised to guide in.
A non-Omani can therefore be licensed to guide in German, French, Russian, Mandarin or Farsi — but not in English. If your business model assumes an expatriate English-speaking guide on staff, it does not work.
We confirmed this four ways: the regulation text, the MHT licensing page, the MHT e-portal service record, and Al Roya's summary. It is one of the better-documented rules in the sector.
Beyond language, the age rules differ by nationality. An Omani guide must be at least 18. A non-Omani guide must be at least 25, and must hold employment authorisation through a licensed travel office — a foreign guide cannot operate independently.
| Guide category | Omani | Non-Omani |
|---|---|---|
| Category 1 — general, all governorates | OMR 20 / 2 years | OMR 50 / 1 year |
| Category 2 — regional or site-specific | OMR 10 / 2 years | OMR 50 / 1 year |
| Category 3 — specialist | OMR 10 / 2 years | OMR 50 / 1 year |
Specialist covers fields such as architecture, geology and adventure tourism. Note that non-Omani licences run for one year against two for Omanis, at more than double the fee — so the annual cost of a foreign guide is roughly five to ten times that of an Omani one.
The other conditions apply to everyone: full legal capacity, good conduct and reputation, no felony or dishonesty conviction unless rehabilitated, a current medical fitness certificate, fluency in a foreign language in addition to Arabic, the training programme certificate from Oman Tourism College, and a pass in the ministry's own examination. Processing is stated at seven days. Guides are prohibited from discussing political or religious topics and must work through licensed travel agencies.
The freelance register for guides
On 21 December 2025 the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism, the National Employment Programme and the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion launched a freelance work register for tourist guides — a framework for guides working independently rather than as employees. It sits alongside the mandatory MHT guide licence and does not replace it. As of September 2025 there were 906 licensed Omani guides. Treat the register as a live development rather than a settled scheme.
The Ministry of Heritage and Tourism is not the only authority
Tourist and passenger road transport does not sit with MHT at all. It falls under the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology and the Land Transport Law, which covers passenger and freight transport, taxis, rentals and app-based services.
The practical consequence is that a tourism company operating its own vehicles needs two separate authorisations — the MHT tourism licence for the tourism activity, and MTCIT transport permits for the vehicles and drivers. These are different ministries, different applications and different renewal cycles.
We did not find a single competitor page that states this correctly. Most list "tourist transport licence" as though it were an MHT category, which it is not. If you are budgeting for a fleet, budget for the MTCIT side as a distinct workstream.
Foreign ownership: tourism is open
Tourism is not a reserved activity, and you do not need an Omani partner. The Foreign Capital Investment Law, Royal Decree 50/2019, permits 100% foreign ownership across more than 1,700 activities and the general minimum capital requirement has been abolished. An Omani partner is not required, though employing at least one Omani secures reduced registration fees.
We checked both reserved-activity lists directly. Ministerial Decision 209/2020, the original list of roughly 40 activities closed to foreign investment, contains no travel agency, tour guide, tourist transport, taxi or general land transport entry — and it expressly carves tourist establishments out of one of its restrictions. Ministerial Decision 435/2024, which added 28 further activities in September 2024, is entirely handicrafts, retail and personal services, with no tourism entry either.
One condition catches people out. A foreign national already employed in Oman may establish a company only with a no-objection certificate from their current employer, or after that employment contract has been cancelled. Royal Decree 69/2023 itself contains no nationality or Omani-ownership requirement for tourism businesses.
The bank guarantee question is unresolved
We are not going to give you a bank guarantee figure, because we could not establish one, and we would rather say so than repeat a number we cannot trace.
Article 68 of the new regulation refers to a bank guarantee equivalent to the contract value. But Article 68 sits a long way from the travel office provisions in Articles 32 and 33, and in context it most likely governs hotel and tourist-establishment operation-and-management contracts rather than travel agencies. We could not confirm that it applies to a travel and tourism office at all.
Separately, Oman Daily published a headline reporting that amendments to the tourism executive regulation cancelled bank guarantees for the licence applications of 17 tourism establishment types. That page returned an error on every attempt and we could not read which 17 types, or what the previous amounts were. Contextually it aligns with the 2022 amendments.
So there are two possibilities — a guarantee that may not apply to you, and a cancellation we could not verify. Ring MHT on +968 22088000 or email info@mht.gov.om and ask directly before you budget for a guarantee or assume there is none.
No consultancy source we examined gives a traceable bank guarantee figure either. Where they give numbers, they cite no article and no decision. That is not a coincidence.
Penalties
The criminal penalties sit in the statute, not the regulation. Article 17 of Royal Decree 69/2023 provides for imprisonment from 10 days to 6 months, and a fine from OMR 6,000 to OMR 50,000 — either or both — for practising a tourism activity without a licence. Penalties double on repeat offences.
Article 18 sets fines of OMR 3,000–6,000 and OMR 1,000–4,000 for other categories of breach. Article 19 caps ministerial administrative fines at OMR 6,000. Article 16 makes legal persons liable for double the maximum individual fine. Article 21 allows the minister to settle before prosecution concludes.
- Engaging an unlicensed guide — OMR 1,000–2,000 plus suspension up to one month
- Failing to insure tourists — OMR 1,000–2,000 plus suspension up to one month
- Safety non-compliance — OMR 2,000–6,000 plus OMR 100 per day, capped at OMR 3,000
- Guide conduct violations — OMR 300–1,000
- Late payment of the tourism fee — 10% per month of the amount owed
A number of pages still state that unlicensed tourism activity attracts a fine "not exceeding OMR 3,000". That figure comes from Articles 12, 15, 18 and 19 of Royal Decree 33/2002 — the Tourism Law that was repealed in 2023.
The current exposure is OMR 6,000 to OMR 50,000 plus possible imprisonment. The gap between the stale figure and the real one is large enough to change a decision.
What no official source publishes
- No consolidated English fee schedule. MHT does not publish one. The Appendix 1 figures above come from the Arabic regulation text and Arabic press coverage.
- No substantive eligibility content on gov.om. The official travel agency service page lists conditions as "–" and processing time as one minute. It tells you the fee and nothing else.
- No published list of the documents the ministry's guide requires, and no published breakdown of adventure tourism sub-activities.
- No Oman-specific IATA financial security amount on the accessible pages. IATA lists 26 Oman accreditation requirements — attested banking mandate, commercial registration, shareholder identity documents, financial statements — but any bank guarantee figure sits inside a downloadable application guide.
- Whether the adventure tourism licence-holder must be Omani. Decree Blog reports this; the regulation text we retrieved did not restate it. Treat it as plausible and unconfirmed.
One thing worth being clear about, since it comes up constantly: IATA accreditation is not an Omani licensing requirement. It is an industry credential you need only to issue airline tickets on IATA stock through the BSP. MHT does not reference it, and you can hold a full travel and tourism office licence without it. If you want it, it is a separate process with its own conditions, run by IATA rather than by any Omani ministry.
Is there a Class A or Class B travel agency licence in Oman?
Can a foreigner own a travel agency in Oman?
Can a foreigner work as a tour guide in Oman?
How much does a travel agency licence cost in Oman?
Do I need a bank guarantee to open a travel agency in Oman?
What is the fine for running a tourism business without a licence in Oman?
If you want the MHT application, the MTCIT permits and the commercial registration handled as one sequence rather than three, that is the kind of thing our office does day to day. The late-October regularisation deadline is the part worth acting on first.