The Arab countries tourist business is presented in the article from the point of view of com-petitive advantages selection and evaluation. Among advantages there are the presence of the seacoast or bay, favorable climatic conditions, unique natural resources, cultural and his-torical monuments, developed tourist infrastructure, a variety of tourist high level services, discounts and others. Competitive advantages can be classified as natural, economic, infra-structural and national factors and, in turn, they have an impact on the development of countries through the promotion of entrepreneurship, job creation, the maintenance of law, order and security, the preservation of cultural heritage and environment protection. The work outlines the dynamics of tourism industry indicators development in the region, assesses the tourism and hotel market attractiveness in terms of services quality, net cost, marketing and transaction costs, market share and brand awareness. It is determined that the tourism market of such countries as the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, can be considered as more attractive. There is a high correlation between the level of GDP and tourism competitiveness in the country. The weight of tourism in the economy is increasing in 8 countries of the region.It is shown that the key factors in the formation of tourism business competitive ad-vantages are political stability and security guarantees. The events of the "Arab spring" ex-tremely adversely affected the industry, even in those countries where there were no uprisings and civil unrest. The solution of the problem of attracting tourists to the Arab countries can be seen as ap-plication of strategies for creating and developing competitive advantages: focusing on the source of negative events, the strategy of target audience, "messages" and the transformation of liabilities into assets.