Tourism under Muhammad Reza Shah (r. 1941-1979) remains a surprisingly understudied field with hotels like the Royal Hilton often simply serving as glitzy symbols of purported westoxification (gharbzadegi) or off-handed references to opulence and conspicuous consumption in existing narratives. Rarely is tourism studied in its own right in this period. Using Iranian newspapers, magazines, advertisements, tourism booklets, government reports, and bank statistics, I show how Iran went from a limited, haphazard national monument approach to tourism in the 1920s and 1930s to constructing a modern, national tourist system in the 1960s and onwards meant to generate mass tourism in line with the state’s other goal of building a mass consumerist society. While the previous ruler, Reza Khan Shah, initiated national heritage projects to bolster its nationalist credentials, to exude a sense of Orientalist-tinged high culture, and to attract foreign visitors, these projects remained limited in scope and appeal. They also suffered from outside factors like slow economic growth and the disruptions of World War II. Signs of a more active interest in tourism policy came in 1961 when Iran joined the World Organization for Tourism, and the shah became its patron. Two years later, the government created the Iran National Tourist Organization (INTO). INTO, other government agencies, and domestic and foreign businesses would spearhead a reinvigorated tourism policy that pitched Iran as a modern, attractive, self-Orientalized nation for the citizens of developed countries beyond the Middle East and Muslim world. The fruits of this transformation were not only in the expansion of hotels, museums, attractions, restaurants, roads, airlines, advertising, and tourist agencies catering to potential tourists, but also in the actual numbers as annual visitors rocketed from about 6,000 in 1958 to 650,000 by 1977. Building on the work of Talinn Grigor, then, this paper shows that the 1960s were the formative decade for modern Iranian tourism, creating much of the initial infrastructure, cultures, and technical knowledge that has undergirded Iranian tourism to this day.