Skift Take
Saudi Arabia's "Maldives of the Middle East", The Red Sea, will cost you at least $500 a night to experience. To remedy this, the developers are planning a whole new development to place their mid-market hotels.
The master developer of Saudi Arabia's super-luxury island tourism project, The Red Sea, is working on another giga-project that will house more affordable hotel options and tap into a market — millions of travelers strong. Red Sea Global (RSG) group CEO John Pagano confirmed the development to Skift, adding that it will open before 2030 and introduce thousands more hotel rooms to the kingdom's burgeoning tourism sector.
"Mid-market has a huge market potential and there are some locations that are better suited to that, closer to larger urban areas," Pagano said. "When we move to more mid-scale, we'll start getting into the three-star (hotel) offerings, different products, different positioning, and different target audiences. It's about being strategic across the entire Red Sea coast."
"As you get into the more mid-scale offerings, the hotel sizes get bigger because you need that scale to make them financially viable. Our sites are very large, many thousands of keys."
John Pagano. Credit: RSGThe project will be south of The Red Sea, putting it closer to Saudi's second major city, Jeddah.
In October 2022, The Red Sea Development Company rebranded as Red Sea Global, announced at that time it would be developing around a dozen more sites along the Red Sea coast. This mid-market hotel hotspot is one of them.
"We are basically developing everything south of Neom," said Pagano.
Tapping Into Religious TourismLocated nearer to Jeddah, the new project could seek to draw in the c