How to Build a Lifestyle Hotel Brand in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia has already won the argument about scale. Knight Frank expects the Kingdom’s quality hotel supply to grow by 18% by 2027, with luxury and upscale rooms making up 76% of the total by 2030. A large share of that growth carries a lifestyle signature: at IHG, luxury and lifestyle hotels now represent nearly half of the group’s Saudi pipeline. Scale has been won. Desire is next. When every new address can promise marble, a rooftop and a famous chef, the only question a guest really asks is the simplest one: why here, and why this hotel?
Start with a point of view
Find the culture that is still alive
Saudi Arabia holds several countries within one: the mud-brick geometry of Najd, the carved wooden rawashin of old Jeddah, the volcanic silence of AlUla, the hard white light of the Red Sea. The shortcut is well known. A palm tree in the logo, a dallah on the reception desk, calligraphy used as wallpaper. Guests see through it in seconds. A lifestyle brand starts from what is still alive: how a neighbourhood moves after sunset, how coffee is offered and how a small shake of the cup says enough, how a city gathers at the weekend. Heritage then becomes a grammar the brand speaks fluently.
Design for the guests who are already here
According to the 2022 census, 63% of Saudis are under thirty. They travel widely, follow the same designers, chefs and artists as their peers in Paris or Seoul, and they recognise a cliché faster than any foreign visitor. In Riyadh or Jeddah, a lifestyle hotel is also a local address: a lobby where people meet without a booking, a restaurant that fills on its reputation alone, a programme of talks, music and exhibitions. Design for the city first, and the international guest will feel it. Design for the brochure, and the city will stay away.
Turn the brand into an experience
A name in two languages, a signature for the senses
The name comes first and carries the most weight. It has to sound right in Arabic and in English, look beautiful in both scripts, and survive a conversation with native speakers before it survives a trademark search. Then come the details nobody asks for and everybody remembers: a scent that greets you before the receptionist does, music that changes at eleven at night, the weight of a room key, the first line of the menu. Luxury Houses have always known that desire lives in these details. A hotel brand deserves the same obsession.
Make the opening a cultural moment
The most valuable months in a hotel’s life come before it opens. That is when the brand can exist without a single room: collaborations with Saudi designers, chefs and musicians, a first circle of guests who feel they discovered the place, a story the press wants to tell. A hotel that opens this way arrives with its reputation already made. In a market adding rooms at this pace, the hotels that last will be the ones people want to belong to. That conviction shapes our hotel branding work across the Middle East.
