The gradient of colours below as we fly over the Red Sea is striking. Shades of blue go from near-navy to aqua until the sea meets the Arabian Peninsula, a flat strip of pale yellow sand that gradually gives way to the darker brown of the Hijaz Mountains asserting themselves under the bright sunshine.
As we land, the newness of it all is unmistakable; while there are now several connections weekly from Riyadh, Jeddah and Dubai, our flight is the only commercial flight that day. A large plane with the Saudi royal fleet markings on its tail sits next to a small private jet. Two rows of shiny Lucid electric vehicles painted teal wait for passengers to disembark.
After a small glitch with the trunk of my chauffeured EV, we are on our way to Turtle Bay, a new beach located 500km north of Jeddah. There, a speedboat waits to take me to Ummahat (Arabic for “mothers”), three islands transformed in the short span of five years to match the transformation of the kingdom itself.
The St Regis Red Sea Resort is relatively new and it shows. Surfaces are gleaming and spotless; guests are few and far between. My personal butler is already on the jetty with a golf cart to drive me to my villa, which sits at the end of a boardwalk stretching like a tree branch into the shallow waters. He offers me a key bracelet with dark beads and a wooden charm. “This way you don’t have to worry about forgetting your keycard,” he says. Designed by Kengo Kuma, with glass walls and an arching shell-shaped roof, my villa is configured such that both the terrace and pool enjoy unobstructed views of the sea in total privacy. Ayman, a young local chef who was trained in Geneva and recently came back from a visit to Tokyo, serves me a fine selection of sashimi, dumplings and a beef ramen at Gishiki 45, the Japanese restaurant. It’s 27ºC but a breeze flutters the shrubs around me as I sample a cheesecake nestled next to a mango compôte. The bar begins to fill up with middle-aged men unwinding and blowing shisha smoke.
The resort is part of an ambitious scheme that will eventually comprise 50 hotels on 22 islands and six inland sites by 2030. The Red Sea Project, as it’s known, is just one element of an even larger plan to make this once closely restricted kingdom a major luxury tourist destination. The hotel offers activities of all sorts: I’ve never snorkelled before, and the eastern Red Sea coral reefs – some of the most pristine left on Earth, and an easy 10-minute boat ride away – do not disappoint. So far, so luxurious. But as I lounge in the villa later that day, I realise there’s been no adhan, or call to prayer, at noon, despite it being Friday. When I later ask why, I am told there is no mosque on the island.
For a country that has always distinguished itself by sticking to its Islamic traditions, this may strike visitors as slightly odd. But this is not the Saudi Arabia I grew up in, where one of the most puritanical interpretations of Islam was practised and enforced. Back then, shops closed five times a day at prayer time, genders were strictly segregated and cameraphones were, for a while, forbidden. Visas to visit the country were extremely difficult to attain. Now, with tourism identified as a main pillar of the state’s strategy to diversify the economy away from oil, some concessions have been made – among them a vastly simplified tourist e-visa system. Red Sea Global, the developer owned by the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund that is behind the project, wants it to compete with the Maldives and the Caribbean. For visitors, that means the muezzin’s call to prayer has been set to mute.
It’s a subtle but telling new development in a country that has until very recently cleaved closely to religious custom. Simon Casson, CEO of Corinthia Hotels and the former president of Four Seasons in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, recalls how authorities flatly rejected his plan to put a piano in the lobby when Four Seasons opened its first hotel in the kingdom more than 20 years ago. “They said absolutely no live music. So we installed a self-playing; and they demanded its removal as well,” he says.
Today there may be music, but there is still no alcohol. Government officials have been coy when asked about its legalisation. “We’re doing pretty well without it at the moment,” says a senior official at the Ministry of Tourism, adding that alcohol has “never been part of our culture” and does not match with tourists who want an authentic local experience.
Developers, meanwhile, are confident that this will not put off new visitors. “We’re providing an elevated experience,” says John Pagano, chief executive of Red Sea Global. “Yes, alcohol would be nice to have but I don’t believe it’s absolutely essential.” For now, the St Regis is serving non-alcoholic champagne as a temporary compromise. The general consensus is that lifting the ban is a question of when rather than if: a restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Nujuma resort, which opened in May 2024 on another of Ummahat’s islands, has reportedly been built with an impressive wine cellar. Shebara, a resort with striking silver pods over water that Red Sea Global is operating itself, also opened last year.
In the meantime, the St Regis Red Sea Resort goes to the same lengths to cater to its clients as it would at any other St Regis across the world. When one wealthy Saudi asked to be served by local staff only, there was a rush to put all of them at his disposal. The majority of guests when I visited were also local, including dozens of men from a business clan in the Eastern Province on a family-bonding trip. That same family may have chosen Dubai or Sharm el-Sheikh for their trip in the recent past.
The government has invested vast amounts of money to change the kingdom’s image from closed and rigidly conservative to open and welcoming. The Saudis plan to spend more than $1tn over the next 10 years to develop multiple tourist destinations, including the futuristic Neom region in the north-west, a sports and entertainment complex in Qiddiya outside Riyadh, and the expansion of the historical mud town of Diriyah, the ancestral home of the royal family, now part of Riyadh. The scale of its ambition is staggering: some 320,000 new hotel rooms are expected to open before the end of the decade, according to consultancy Knight Frank.
Officials originally thought 2020 would be the year of Saudi Arabia’s big splash. But tourism dreams were deferred as the kingdom closed its borders and imposed strict lockdowns and curfews, including a ban on domestic travel. The forced delay may have frustrated officials under pressure from the rulers to deliver, but it also allowed them to develop a business with domestic tourists, who’d spent around $15bn to travel abroad in 2019.
The push for tourism has been all-encompassing and exorbitantly expensive. Sports stars and influencers have faced opprobrium for taking money from Saudi Arabia, whose critics accuse the kingdom of widening a crackdown on dissent and freedom of expression despite a push to promote social liberalisation. “No amount of money spent on image laundering and sportswashing campaigns can conceal the rapidly escalating repression in the country,” Dana Ahmed, Amnesty International’s Middle East researcher, said in a statement during the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review. Government officials reject the sportswashing allegations and argue that recent reforms have both promoted human rights and delivered economic growth.
However, there is certainly an extreme contrast between allowing Cristiano Ronaldo, who now plays for Saudi club Al-Nassr, to live in the country with his partner and children out of wedlock, and the shrinking margin for freedom of expression in recent years. Authorities have released scores of political prisoners in recent months, but the intolerance for dissent seen in the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi – which the state says was a “rogue operation” – continues to run in parallel with the removal of social restrictions. Young Saudis have come up with a name for these contradictions; they call them Ahlam al-Asr, or “the daze of afternoon naps”.
The scrutiny over such paradoxes is likely to intensify as Saudi Arabia was last year confirmed by Fifa as host for the 2034 World Cup, which should help with the tourism drive. But it has not been all smooth sailing: Sindalah, a tourist island located in Neom, is yet to open to the public despite a preview for VIP guests last autumn, and a decline in oil prices is also putting pressure on the kingdom’s spending plans.
While the Red Sea islands are conspicuously luxurious, those seeking a more authentic experience can take a one-hour flight south to Jeddah. The ancient port town has historically served as the gateway to the holy city of Mecca, where millions of Muslims travel for pilgrimage every year, and still offers a balance of old and new.
The city’s historic quarter, a maze of narrow alleyways filled with spice and textile shops known as Al-Balad, unfurls itself like a robe hiding treats. Standing at the heart of it is Beit Nasseef, the grand house where the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz, stayed after entering the city in 1925. Around the corner is Zawiya 97, a community initiative led by Ahmad Angawi, the son of a renowned architect. Angawi oversees a workshop where young craftsmen revive old traditions like the intricate woodwork seen in rawasheen, the traditional window frames that are a defining feature of many houses in Al-Balad.
These 650 tightly packed houses were built by Jeddah’s original families using coral stones and wood imported from south Asia, but had fallen into disrepair. Keen to parlay Al-Balad into a major tourist attraction, the government announced in 2021 a plan to expropriate the entire area, which is now under the control of the Ministry of Culture. Buildings at risk of collapse were quickly shored up, while better-kept homes underwent a careful restoration process. The first results opened to the public last year, in the form of three boutique hotels operated by a company owned by the Public Investment Fund, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund.
In videos promoting the new hotels, members of the original owning families expressed joy at seeing them brought back to life. But that sentiment is not universally shared. Some people feel it is unfair for the government to force owners to give up their properties even though they were compensated. But others argue it would not have been possible to save and renovate heritage houses, many of them abandoned for more than 60 years, without the government’s expropriation.
One of them, Beit Jokhdar, built more than 125 years ago, is full of character. On the outside, it features the largest of the rawasheen in pale green. Inside walls lean slightly, and floors are a little uneven. Next door is a small museum dedicated to Tariq Abdulhakim, a pioneering Saudi musician, with a simple rooftop café.
“Staying in these houses allows visitors to experience Al-Balad’s history and lifestyle firsthand,” says Mohammed Bamehriz, who heads the heritage assets restoration programme. “Guests can walk through rooms that have witnessed centuries of life.”
Out one morning before temperatures begin rising above 35ºC, I come across a hole-in-the-wall shop selling paratha rolls; two pieces for less than $1.50. I then make my way to Minaa, a local speciality coffee shop in the shadow of Beit Nasseef. I have very mixed feelings about the moral and legal conflicts that make this all possible.
Such compromises are considered necessary if the kingdom is to achieve its ambitious tourism goals. The initial target, set by the tourism minister Ahmed al-Khateeb in 2019, was for 100 million tourist visits, and an increase in the sector’s contribution to GDP of 10 per cent by 2030. Saudi Arabia celebrated reaching the milestone of 100 million tourists by the end of 2023 – seven years ahead of schedule – and the 2030 target has been revised to 150 million.
But deeper scrutiny of that celebrated figure suggests the Saudis still have a long way to go: according to UN Tourism, a United Nations agency, 79 million of those tourists were domestic. Of the 27 million foreign visitors, about half are religious tourists coming for the umrah pilgrimage to Islam’s two holiest sites, in Mecca and Medina.
As authorities spend heavily to attract visitors from the west, as well as from developing economies like China and India, the hope is that at least some of these pilgrims can be persuaded to extend their stay. To do so, the government backs two major biannual exhibitions in Riyadh and Jeddah. The latter hosted the second edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale this year, which used the iconic Hajj airport terminal to display a stunning collection of artefacts from more than 1,400 years of Islamic civilisation along with contemporary artworks commissioned specially for the show.
But nowhere is the combination of religion, history, art and culture more visible than in AlUla, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from the holy city of Medina. AlUla is home to the kingdom’s first Unesco World Heritage Site, and arguably the crown jewel of the Saudi tourism project. On a recent visit to Our Habitas, a resort enveloped by rocks that have been sculpted by wind and natural forces into ridged, elongated shapes, I observe a Malaysian family with women in full hijab enjoying their lunch by the pool, next to a western couple in matching turquoise-green bikini and swimming shorts.
The scene would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when the religious police would chase women through malls and markets to enforce the covering of their hair. But this is the new face of Saudi Arabia that Prince Mohammed bin Salman, heir apparent and de facto ruler, wants to present to the world: open, hospitable and tolerant.
Instructions on the “Visit Saudi” website urge tourists to dress modestly, with an illustration suggesting women should not wear “short-above-the-knee” or “revealing” outfits. The authorities do not seem to be enforcing the rules very strictly, but such tolerance does not appear to extend to locals. Domestic media reported last year that four influencers were fined more than $100,000 for dressing immodestly. In January 2024, Manahel al-Otaibi, a 29-year-old fitness influencer, was sentenced to 11 years in prison “because of her choice of clothing and support for women’s rights”, according to human rights groups.
But for the small native population of AlUla – fewer than 50,000 – noises about human rights are drowned out by the sounds of bulldozers and music as the government promotes the area not just as a heritage site but also a venue for arts and culture events. “A key part of this is to really continue and bring back AlUla as a place for cross-culture dialogue, meeting points, being really kind of a centre for people from all over to meet in a contemporary world,” says Nora Aldabal, executive director of arts and creative industries at the Royal Commission for AlUla, which has co-hosted three editions of the Desert X art exhibition since 2020.
The impact of government investment is ubiquitous. When I visited in 2019, there were only a couple of local resorts. New options include The Chedi Hegra, built from the remnants of a train station from the old Ottoman railway. Now the desert heritage sites have rest areas and visitor centres with clean bathrooms, gift shops, and cafés that offer refreshments and gelato. Food options used to be limited to just a handful of pop-up restaurants brought in for the winter season; these days there’s everything from an Entrecôte Café de Paris to Suhail, where the chefs give Saudi dishes a fine-dining twist.
Improving the infrastructure is necessary to meet the expectations of tourists. “We have hosted many local clients, but the international market is growing, and you can see just how much further along Vision 2030 has come,” says Charles Stephenson, COO of Roam, a luxury destination management company (DMC) that is a joint venture with UK-based adventure outfitters Pelorus, which has carved out a niche organising tailor-made itineraries in the kingdom. “The international market has completely woken up to that… At the moment many international tourists don’t know there is much for them to do yet. There’s so much in the pipeline but a lot of it hasn’t yet come online.”
The new restaurants are in the 12th-century Old Town, a network of more than 900 mud houses in an abandoned oasis and known for a sundial that farmers used to mark the changing of seasons and harvest times. That sundial now serves as the entrance to Dar Tantora, a heritage hotel that sees 30 of these houses converted into unique accommodations preserving original architectural elements. The entire hotel is lit by more than 1,800 candles and lanterns. Other than ceiling fans and a few plugs to charge your devices, there is minimal electrical power: no air conditioning, no televisions.
Other cities in the Gulf region have demolished their old mud towns to make way for rapid oil-fuelled development, only to try rebuilding them as tourist attractions with modern technologies in recent years. But Dar Tantora is an actual old town. “There will be some sand and dust,” the hotel manager told me. “So if you’re Kim Kardashian this is probably not for you.”
So who is it for? I asked myself this as I took a dip in the hotel’s infinity pool, where a wall cutout opened to a view of date palm trees and the mountains behind them as the sun slowly peaked. Ostensibly, it is for tens of millions, if the government is to achieve its targets for tourism income; build it and they will come, the thinking goes. Government officials maintain that all tourism projects are designed to be sustainable and to have a minimal impact on the environment; but it is hard to see how anyone can fully predict or calculate the long-term consequences for these once-virgin, now built-up islands and sleepy towns.
As I prepare to fly out of AlUla airport, a foreign tourist sits at a piano and plays “Stand By Me”. As someone who grew up in Saudi Arabia when playing music in public was forbidden, it’s a sonic testament to how much things have changed since 2016. Enjoyable, but a tad disorientating.
The speed of change to turn Saudi Arabia from a mysterious and closed place into a world-class tourist destination can be jarring, but I find myself savouring these moments because they remind me of who we are. As Arabs, we take special pride in welcoming guests to our homes without asking too many questions. There might be fear of the unknown, but the possibilities are enticing.
Ahmed Al Omran travelled as a guest of Roam (experiencesbyroam.com) and Pelorus. They offer a seven-night trip in Saudi Arabia from £9,250 per person, including accommodation, English-speaking guides and drivers, private activities and internal flights