Saudi Arabia opened to international leisure travellers in 2019. Seven years later, the west coast of the kingdom has become the most contested stretch of new development in global luxury hospitality — and the season in which any of it makes sense begins next month.
This is the part most European travellers miss. The Red Sea coast and the desert interior operate on an inverted calendar: October through March is the window, and July is unthinkable. For anyone accustomed to the Mediterranean rhythm, the effect is a second season arriving precisely when the first one ends.
The scale of the thing
Red Sea Global’s project spans some 28,000 square kilometres and an archipelago of more than ninety islands, divided into three destinations: The Red Sea, the wellness-led AMAALA, and Thuwal. The first resorts began receiving guests in 2023. Eight more were slated to open across 2026, taking the total towards sixteen properties and roughly three thousand rooms.
The opening roster reads like a directory of the industry. The St. Regis Red Sea Resort, Six Senses Southern Dunes, Nujuma — a Ritz-Carlton Reserve — and Shebara, the developer’s own brand on Sheybarah Island, whose mirrored orbital villas by Killa Design have become the destination’s most photographed structure. The Red Sea EDITION on Shura Island won a widely publicised reader vote as the best new hotel opening in the world earlier this year. Four Seasons has opened at both Shura Island and at AMAALA’s Triple Bay, the latter named by La Liste among its top five global openings of 2026.
Still arriving at AMAALA: Rosewood, Six Senses, The Ritz-Carlton, Clinique La Prairie, Nammos, and Equinox’s first hotel outside the Americas, a Foster + Partners building of 128 sleep-optimised rooms. Miraval has opened its first property outside the United States on Shura Island.
The constraint that makes it interesting
What distinguishes this from other destination-scale developments is a set of self-imposed limits. The Red Sea destination runs on renewable energy, and visitor numbers are capped to protect one of the world’s largest barrier reef systems. AMAALA sits within the Prince Mohammed bin Salman Nature Reserve. Access is via a dedicated airport, Red Sea International.
Whether the environmental accounting holds up over decades is a question worth asking honestly rather than assuming either way. But the design premise — low density enforced by policy rather than by market scarcity — is the opposite of what the Gulf has historically built, and it deserves to be judged on its own terms.
AlUla, which is the older story
Inland and north, AlUla makes a different case entirely. Hegra, the Nabataean city carved into sandstone outcrops, is Saudi Arabia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site — the southern counterpart to Petra, built by the same civilisation, and for most of the modern era effectively unvisited.
The hospitality has arrived carefully. Banyan Tree AlUla opened in 2022 in Wadi Ashar with 79 tented villas designed by AW2, referencing Bedouin structures rather than importing a resort vocabulary. Our Habitas AlUla, the Ashar Tented Resort and Chedi Hegra have followed, with Hyatt’s first AlUla property and an Autograph Collection house in the pipeline. In Diriyah, outside Riyadh and beside the UNESCO-listed Turaif district, Aman’s Janu brand is due, with Four Seasons following later in the decade.
How to think about it
The candid position is this: the archaeology at Hegra is world-significant and undersubscribed, the reef diving is among the least degraded anywhere, and the properties being built are, by any technical measure, exceptional. It is also true that a great deal of this remains new enough that service cultures are still forming, and that some announced openings will slip, as they always do.
The residences component — Red Sea Residences alongside branded units at the Four Seasons properties — follows the pattern we traced in the branded residence boom, and is arguably the clearest signal of what the developers actually expect: not visitors, but returners. Visit the official Red Sea Global website
Featured photo: © Red Sea Global