The Surprising Fact

Around one out of every five tourism facilities in Lebanon is concentrated in just two governorates: Baabda and Akkar.
When I first mapped the number of hotels, restaurants, cafés, and guest houses across all regions, this pattern immediately stood out.

Lebanon is often celebrated for its geographic diversity – mountains, coast, valleys, and historic towns – yet the distribution of tourism infrastructure reveals a different story, one marked by clear regional imbalance. Even more interesting, Baabda and Akkar are not traditionally seen as the country’s top touristic destinations, which makes this concentration even more surprising.

Setting the Context

Tourism has long been one of Lebanon’s essential economic pillars. It creates jobs, sustains small and medium businesses, and brings much-needed spending into local communities.

Because of this, understanding where tourism infrastructure is located is not just a mapping exercise. It helps us see deeper patterns in development, accessibility, and how opportunities are distributed across the country. Regions with more facilities attract more visitors, investment, and employment, while others risk being left behind.

Introducing the Visualization

To explore this issue, I developed the visualization shown below. It ranks Lebanese governorates by their total number of tourism facilities, combining four types of establishments:

• Hotels

• Restaurants

• Cafés

• Guest houses

The data comes from the Lebanon Tourism Dataset 2024 and reflects the most recent nationwide mapping of tourism infrastructure. The chart uses color to highlight the top two regions, with the remaining governorates shown in muted tones to provide context without overwhelming the viewer.

The Core Insight

The chart makes one fact impossible to ignore:

Baabda and Akkar together host 1,249 tourism facilities – about 20% of all facilities in Lebanon.

Baabda leads with 631 facilities, followed closely by Akkar with 618. No other governorate reaches these levels. The third-highest region, Matn, drops to 383 facilities, and the numbers continue to decrease as we move toward more peripheral areas such as Hasbaya, Marjeyoun, and the Bekaa.

This reveals a strong centralization of tourism infrastructure in just a few locations, while many other regions operate with a significantly smaller base of hotels, restaurants, cafés, and guest houses.

Why This Matters

This concentration has several important implications:

1. Limited Regional Economic Spillover

Tourism-driven income is more likely to stay within a small set of governorates. Regions with fewer facilities miss out on employment opportunities, business growth, and investment linked to tourism.

2. Uneven Visitor Experience

Visitors may repeatedly encounter the same areas, such as Baabda and Akkar, instead of discovering Lebanon’s full variety of landscapes, heritage sites, and rural communities. This can reinforce the perception that tourism is “meant” for certain regions only.

3. Underused Infrastructure Potential

Areas like Tyre, Baalbek-Hermel, Batroun, and Nabatieh have strong cultural, historical, and natural assets, yet they remain comparatively underserved in terms of tourism infrastructure. The gap between their potential and current facility levels represents a missed opportunity.

A Deeper Imbalance

Looking at the totals by group of regions makes this imbalance even clearer:

• Top 2 governorates (Baabda & Akkar):
  1,249 facilities – about 20% of the national total

• Next 3 governorates combined:
  1,096 facilities – around 18%

• Remaining 20+ governorates combined:
  3,801 facilities – about 62%

Most individual governorates therefore hold less than 5% of the country’s tourism infrastructure. This suggests long-standing gaps in how tourism investments and services have been distributed geographically.

An Opportunity Hidden in the Data

While these patterns highlight inequality, they also point to a clear opportunity.

If even a modest share of new tourism projects, guest houses, or hospitality investments were directed toward underrepresented regions, Lebanon could unlock:

• More balanced economic development

• New, locally anchored jobs

• Stronger domestic tourism flows

• A richer and more diverse visitor experience

Regions such as Zgharta, Batroun, Tyre, and the Bekaa already show emerging clusters of facilities. With targeted planning and support, they could become anchors for broader regional tourism strategies.

Final Takeaway

Understanding where tourism infrastructure currently exists – and where it is missing – is essential for designing a more inclusive tourism future for Lebanon.

The data tells a clear and actionable story:

Lebanon’s tourism future depends on looking beyond a small set of concentrated governorates and deliberately investing across the country’s full geography.

By doing so, tourism can shift from being a localized advantage to a national engine for development and shared prosperity.