The Middle East's first women-only hotel has opened in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. As our religious affairs reporter Frances Harrison explains women only hotels and transport services are a growing trend world wide.

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The hotel has twenty-five rooms and offers round the clock services to guests. There's a pool and spa, with yoga and fitness classes, which the hotel hopes will attract women on business trips and well as expatriates from the nearby diplomatic quarter and local women coming for fun.

This is the first spa hotel available to women all the time, pools in other hotels are only open to women on certain fixed days or hours. And in a country where women are required by law to cover themselves in Islamic dress when in public it's a huge bonus that inside the hotel they can move around uncovered as if they were at home. As the manager put it, it's like being anywhere else in the world.

Saudi tourism officials who attended the launch of the hotel have encouraged other women to invest in similar hotels across the Kingdom. Women-only hotels already exist in America, Berlin and the former Yugoslavia. And Britain, for example, has a hotel offering a floor exclusively for women while Tehran and Bombay have women only taxi services.

Frances Harrison, BBC Religious Affairs reporter

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has been overwhelming
has been much greater and more positive than expected

round the clock
24 hour-a-day

expatriates
people from other countries who are now living in Saudi Arabia

diplomatic quarter
the area where there are many foreign embassies and consulates and homes for the people who work in them

spa hotel
hotel that offers beauty treatments and facilities

required by law
must do something because of the rules of the country

a huge bonus
a big advantage

put it
explained it

who attended the launch
who were at the opening

exclusively
only

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