Saudi Arabia’s tourism sector is leaning on artificial intelligence to manage the growing number of options facing travelers, with companies like Almosafer and IBM pitching the technology as both a consumer-facing tool and a back-end governance framework.
That dual focus surfaced as Almosafer, the Kingdom and region’s leading omnichannel travel brand, reported that AI-driven personalization had produced measurable conversion gains, while IBM introduced Sovereign Core, a software product designed to govern the sensitive data that flows through airline, hotel, and digital booking platforms.
The Personalization Push at Almosafer
The customer-facing side of Saudi tourism’s AI pivot has moved first. Almosafer CEO Muzzamil Ahussain told Arab News that AI is reshaping the industry by cutting through what he called the irrelevant majority of travel options. The framing sits against the assumption that travelers face too few choices.
“The real problem was never having too few options; it was having too many irrelevant ones,” Ahussain said. “AI shifts that equation by understanding intent first, who is traveling, with whom, for what purpose, at what budget, and with what cultural preferences.” He pointed to Saudi families planning trips to the Red Sea as an example of what that intent modelling produces in practice.
Almosafer’s systems summarize reviews from past travelers with similar profiles to surface more relevant recommendations. The company is working with the Saudi Tourism Authority to improve the discoverability of destinations across the Kingdom.
The clearest measurable result sits in conversion. The 22 percent lift Ahussain ties to the AI personalization work, he describes as part of a structural shift from a click economy to a conversation economy. The framing recurs across the company’s public positioning of its AI bet.
From Click Economy to Conversation Economy
The five-factor intent model Ahussain describes is what replaces the older logic of search-by-destination and filter-by-price. Travelers no longer arrive by typing a city into a search box. They arrive with companion composition, trip purpose, budget level, cultural preference, and identity already in hand, and the recommendation engine now weighs those signals together rather than in isolation.
Ahussain tied that shift to the broader attempt to spread tourism beyond the Kingdom’s traditional hubs, and the destinations he lists mix regional centers with flagship giga-projects:
- Abha, a highland city in the southwest with a cooler summer climate than the central deserts
- Jubail, an industrial city on the Persian Gulf coast undergoing tourism development
- Tabuk, a northwestern gateway near the planned NEOM developments and ancient rock-art sites
- The Red Sea, a regenerative-tourism resort project spanning 90 islands
- Qiddiya City, an entertainment and giga-project south of Riyadh
The Engineering Underbelly
The visible travel app sits on top of an engineering scale the sector rarely discusses. Ahussain said Almosafer’s platform runs on more than 250 million lines of code and a microservices architecture processing approximately 10 billion requests per month.
Inside that stack, around 50 percent of the company’s code is co-authored by AI and 85 percent of engineering teams actively use AI tools. For a company operating at that scale, those percentages describe a working environment where AI now participates alongside engineers rather than sitting apart from them as a feature.
At that level of code co-authorship, AI now assists code suggestions, code review, and infrastructure configuration alongside human engineers. That collaboration puts AI output through a review loop that has to scale with it. The recommendation system built on that code later inherits whatever the code carries.
Travelers see the personalization layer. What supports it is closer to a software company operating at the scale of a mid-sized bank, with the same engineering risks and the same oversight questions that follow from running AI-augmented code at that volume.
Saudi Arabia’s broader tourism build-out carries that scale question into the regulatory layer Al-Rashed described. The data-protection and AI-governance requirements that apply in the Kingdom reach travel platforms, hotels, and booking systems as well. The recommendation engines travelers interact with sit inside that same governed stack.
Why Governance Is the Harder Problem
The data question underneath all of this is where IBM sees its opening. Ayman Al-Rashed, regional vice president of IBM Saudi Arabia, framed tourism itself as a trust transaction. Visitors hand over identities, payment details, itineraries, and preferences through every booking, search, and check-in, and AI-driven personalization runs directly on that stream.
Al-Rashed told Arab News that trust is the load-bearing element of any AI deployment in travel. To address it, IBM introduced Sovereign Core, a software product designed to embed governance, control, and compliance into cloud environments while creating a secure foundation for AI-driven innovation. Travel platforms, airlines, hotels, and airports all sit inside the trust chain Sovereign Core is meant to govern. The challenge is regional rather than global, because each jurisdiction writes its own rules on data.
What customers see is often the visible layer, a chatbot, mobile application, or personalized recommendation. The real work happens behind the scenes, ensuring the AI is using trusted data, models are governed, systems are monitored, and humans can intervene when needed.
Ayman Al-Rashed, regional vice president of IBM Saudi Arabia, in Arab News.
Al-Rashed added that the data question is not volume but lifecycle. “The biggest consideration is not the volume of data being collected, but how that data is governed throughout its lifecycle,” he said. Travelers booking flights, hotels, and tours across jurisdictions leave a trail of data subject to overlapping regulatory regimes, and AI systems that personalize based on that trail compound the question of where the data lives and under whose rules.
The back-end engineering and the back-end governance together decide how far the personalization push can travel without breaking the trust contract tourism runs on.
What Travelers Actually See
For now, the consumer-facing surface in Saudi Arabia remains thin. On April 8, 2026, Almosafer launched its own application inside ChatGPT, becoming the first Saudi application to offer consumer services through the platform, according to the ChatGPT travel app launch in the Middle East. Skyscanner brought its metasearch app inside ChatGPT for the region on the same day.
Skyscanner Chief AI Officer Piero Sierra told Skift the rollout covers the UAE and Saudi Arabia because travelers there are at the forefront of AI adoption for trip planning. The application surfaces itineraries, hotels, and bookings through a chat interface rather than a tap-through list of links, the same visible-layer logic Almosafer has described in its broader AI work.
Consumer-facing AI bookings inside the Kingdom remain at an early stage, with the April 8 ChatGPT launches the first major deployments of conversational booking tools for Saudi travelers. The Almosafer and Skyscanner consumer launches are the visible top of a substantially larger system running travel recommendations, payment processing, identity verification, and reservation engines in the background.
The Vision 2030 Bet
The convergence of AI and tourism sits inside Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan, the national diversification strategy that places tourism and digital transformation among the Kingdom’s fastest-growing sectors. The two tracks meet at a single policy bet: personalizing visitor experience and governing the underlying data are both conditions for sustained tourism growth beyond oil. Ahussain has framed AI as a foundational layer for tourism in the Kingdom, with the trajectory pointing toward further personalization, additional language support, and broader integration of booking, accommodation, and on-the-ground services.
Ahussain and Al-Rashed framed their companies in those terms. Almosafer positions its AI work as discovery infrastructure for destinations the Kingdom wants to develop. IBM positions Sovereign Core as the regulatory spine that allows AI deployments to scale without crossing trust and compliance lines. The two roles are not redundant but complementary, with personalization above and governance below. First-time visitors to the Kingdom will benefit from a practical guide for first-time visitors to Saudi Arabia before an AI-curated itinerary ever gets a chance to match them with Tabuk, The Red Sea, or Qiddiya City.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is artificial intelligence being used in Saudi Arabia’s tourism sector?
AI tools in Saudi tourism are deployed across two main lanes: customer-facing personalization, including Almosafer’s AI-summarized traveler reviews and intent-based destination recommendations, and back-end governance, including IBM’s Sovereign Core, which embeds compliance and oversight into the cloud environments that run travel platforms.
What is Almosafer, and what is its role in Saudi tourism’s AI push?
Almosafer Travel and Tourism Co. is the omnichannel travel brand at the center of the AI personalization work in Saudi tourism. It runs on a microservices architecture, summarizes traveler reviews, surfaces destinations such as Abha, Jubail, and Tabuk alongside giga-projects including The Red Sea and Qiddiya City, and has reported a 22 percent increase in conversion rates tied to its AI review summaries.
What is IBM Sovereign Core?
Sovereign Core is the product IBM introduced to address the governance gap that emerges when travel platforms scale AI across jurisdictions. Ayman Al-Rashed of IBM Saudi Arabia described it as a way to manage sensitive customer data and AI workloads in line with local regulatory requirements.
Which Saudi destinations is AI helping promote?
Muzzamil Ahussain of Almosafer said AI is actively highlighting destinations such as Abha, Jubail, and Tabuk, alongside giga-projects including The Red Sea and Qiddiya City, in an effort to diversify tourism beyond Riyadh, Jeddah, and Makkah.
What is the connection between Vision 2030 and AI in tourism?
Vision 2030 is Saudi Arabia’s national diversification strategy, and tourism and digital transformation are both flagged as fast-growing sectors inside it. Ahussain has framed AI as the layer that will sit across both, with personalization as the customer-facing surface and governance as the regulatory spine underneath.
