Red Sea Global links up with Kingdom for $530m resort

October 24, 2023, 10:54 AM

The Red Sea Four Seasons resort will have 149 rooms and suites, plus 31 residential properties

Joint venture to build Four Seasons
Shura Island site to open in 2025
Giga-project will have 50 resorts in total

Red Sea Global and Kingdom Holding Company have agreed a SAR2 billion ($530 million) joint venture to develop and own a Four Seasons resort at the Red Sea giga-project.

The luxury development, scheduled to open in early 2025, will be built on Shura Island, the main hub of the 22-island giga-project.

The Four Seasons resort will have 149 rooms and suites, plus 31 residential properties, six restaurants, meeting and events spaces, a marine discovery centre, and facilities for children.

Kingdom Holding Company, the investment firm of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, owns 23.75 percent of Four Seasons.

“This investment will form part of our broader strategy on further investments in the Saudi Arabian high growth market,” the holding company’s CEO, Talal Ibrahim Almaiman, said at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh.

Eleven resorts are planned for Shura Island, which will also have residential properties, retail, dining and entertainment space, an 18-hole championship golf course and a 118-berth marina.

Red Sea Global is also developing a private island holiday destination, it announced on Tuesday. The Thuwal Private Retreat, located on a 1.7-hectare islet, is set to open next year and will be available for buy-out only.

The developer is a closed joint-stock company wholly owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. (PIF also holds a 16.87 percent stake in Kingdom Holding Company.)

The Red Sea giga-project welcomed its first guests earlier this month. Two of its hotels are open for bookings and the Red Sea airport began operating in September.

When completed in 2030, the destination will have 50 resorts, with up to 8,000 hotel rooms and more than 1,000 residential properties spread across 22 islands and six inland sites.

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 strategy calls for tourism to contribute 10 percent of GDP by the end of the decade.

Tourism revenues grew from less than $1 billion in the first quarter of last year to more than $5 billion in the second quarter of 2023, according to Riyadh-based Jadwa Investment.

The original Vision 2030 target of 100 million visitors a year has been increased to 150 million.