In my experience, it wasn't officials that didn't know how to interpret passports, it was everyone working in hotels. They seemed to love to look for any random visa that happened to have Arabic on it, and decide that must be the one for their country (it never was). The only officials that I encountered (outside the airport) were at police checkpoints where they either didn't even care about looking at my passport, or glanced at it briefly, and returned it (without making any effort to find a visa).

I believe that they instituted the overhaul of the Hegra "tour" system immediately after the new year. I was able to purchase the requisite group tour in early January via the website.

That said, I found much of the tourist infrastructure in and around Al Ula to be extremely frustrating. The Hegra tour was a massive wasted opportunity. The minders literally scolded anyone who dared to step even a foot off the official route. We're visiting these massive stone monolith tombs, and I merely wanted to see them from all sides (without touching or entering them), yet was scolded repeatedly by minders. Also, they had official hiking trails (with professional signs), yet when I attempted to walk one of them, someone scolded me and ordered me to get on the bus. The downtown & old town area was also a huge mess. They literally closed off one of the two main roads through town to convert it into a pedestrian mall, which forced all traffic onto a single road, which was always severely congested. But the worst part is that they also blocked off the only parking area, and instituted a completely undocumented (at least in English) parking shuttle bus system, which meant that it was impossible to easily visit anything in the area, as it required parking 3+ km away. When I attempted to ask police for details on the shuttle, they either couldn't speak enough English to understand my question, or knew nothing about the shuttle beyond "park near Kudu, ride shuttle", which was useless information.

The Harrat viewpoint was one of the rare examples of getting it right. Ample parking, really great facilities, and ample English fluent staff.

Perversely, the Nation Museum was closed the one day that I attempted to visit. Apparently they were filming something there at the time.

Agreed, Al-Balad was a great area to explore.

While I agree its got lots of info, its not well maintained. Much of it was outdated when I looked at it.

The people are indeed very friendly & welcoming. Also something as basic and fundamental as road signs remain very inconsistent in terms of using western numbers or even English. A basic speed limit sign was more often than not, only in the local number system, but something in both western & local, and then very rarely, only in western. That was minor, and its not hard to learn the local numbers. But large information signs only in Arabic is a pretty big issue. There were so many times where there were huge overhead signs only in Arabic, reporting I don't know what, because they were only in Arabic. If some information is so important that it needs to be posted over the roadway, then it should be important enough to include an English version.

I'm just not convinced that the government has a good idea of how to do tourism when so many different pieces of infrastructure are broken, poorly planned & unavailable.