A Global Hotel Brand Just Opened on an Island Saudi Arabia Spent a Decade Keeping Empty

Most new coastlines get built up. This one was built around what was already there.

Fairmont The Red Sea opened this spring on Shura Island, off Saudi Arabia's west coast — the Fairmont brand's first arrival inside The Red Sea Project, Red Sea Global's 28,000-square-kilometer destination spanning more than 90 islands, dormant volcanoes and over 200 kilometers of coastline between the desert and the reef. The resort holds around 200 rooms and suites, seven restaurants and bars including two built out over the water, a spa, a greenhouse and meeting space for close to a thousand — the scale of a flagship, on an island that did not have a hotel on it two years ago.

What makes the arrival worth noting is less the room count than the constraint it opened inside. Red Sea Global has built the destination under a self-imposed cap: no more than one percent of the archipelago's islands developed, the rest left alone by design, with a stated aim of a net-positive impact on the ecosystem by 2040 — solar power, no single-use plastics, construction sequenced around coral and mangrove surveys rather than the other way around. Regenerative tourism gets used as a marketing word often enough to mean very little; here, it is closer to a zoning law, one the master developer wrote before it sold a single room night.

Fairmont's presence adds a legible name to a destination still explaining itself. Four Seasons and other groups are building elsewhere in the same project, but Accor's decision to plant a heritage brand — the same one behind the Plaza and Le Montreux Palace — on an island reachable only by air and boat is a bet that a considered traveler will follow the name into geography they have not yet mapped. The two overwater restaurants and the golf course next door are conventional enough; the reason to go is the reef just past them, and the promise that the reef will still be there in ten years because of how the resort was built, not despite it.

Image: Accor / Fairmont The Red Sea, press office.

— Camille