The Red Sea is a new type of development with a mission to emphasize both people and the environment, and in doing so it is breaking the mould for regenerative tourism in several important and ground-breaking ways. Saudi Projects spoke to Faisal Butt, Projects Delivery Executive Director, Red Sea Global (RSG), first asking him about the new airport experience visitors will enjoy; an experience that will totally transform their journey.
“We wanted to make the arrival experience more memorable and much more enjoyable. The biggest pain for most people when they arrive at an airport, often with children in tow, is the wait for bags. There can be quite a delay before the baggage carousel starts moving, and even then you can be stood there for some time waiting for your particular bags to appear. All you want to do is get to the hotel, enjoy the beach, and sit by the pool, so we decided to look at how we could reduce or even remove all of this hassle.”
The result is that when visitors arrive at the international terminal, they don’t actually need to pick their bags up and can bypass the baggage carousel completely. Sounds heavenly, right? It is because at the arrival point the baggage management system will ensure that all bags go to the chosen resort – the airport knows that Mr and Mrs X are going to Six Senses and their bags will meet them there. This a unique offering compared to traditional airports and makes the whole journey far more pleasurable.
When visitors arrive at the international terminal, they don’t actually need to pick their bags up and can bypass the baggage carousel completely
Of course, if you get nostalgic for the ‘old way’, that’s fine too. You’ll be able to wait next to the carousel until your bags emerge, but we can’t imagine too many people taking that option.
“This took a lot of work and a lot of simulation,” Faisal explains, “because this is a very different way of looking at how you are going to handle baggage. But it’s going to be worth it for all of the people traveling to The Red Sea.”
Becoming the Main Contractor
RSG is handling over a dozen projects along the Red Sea coast, with The Red Sea resort on target to welcome visitors by early 2023. Yet how has this been achieved in such a relatively short space of time – The Red Sea is encircled by the world’s fourth-largest barrier reef system and encompasses over 28,000 square kilometres, with more than 90 unspoilt islands, magnificent beaches, dormant volcanoes, wide dunes, mountain valleys, and historical cultural monuments. It is a big task!
“RSG has built an in-house team of construction managers, project managers, and engineers”
“From day one, our philosophy revolved around delivering this project differently,” Faisal says. “We quickly realized that market capacity is in short supply right now. There is a huge demand for contractors and laborers based on the pipeline of projects, announced projects, and the projects that are actually happening on the ground today. At the same time, there isn’t capacity on the supply side either. So at some point, you have an issue with market capacity and that is reflected in pricing, which can result in hundreds of multiples. This had a knock-on effect that saw us going back and re-packaging and re-tendering, so we said, how do we break this?
“We went the traditional route at first with main contractors. However, for any given asset we have between 15 and maybe 20 construction packages, so essentially you have up to 20 contracts being managed on a single asset. That’s unheard of in this market. So what we’ve done is gone directly to the tier two and tier three contractors, who do the work for us.
This comes with a risk because tiers two and three are probably not able to execute that quality, but that’s where we come in.
“Island development is a new concept in Saudi Arabia, especially in an environment that is considered so sensitive”
“It’s why RSG has built an in-house team of construction managers, project managers, and engineers. We have grown from a handful of people in 2017 to over two thousand today, all to build an in-house capability. The result is that now we are the main contractor; we are going to manage our projects and manage the sub-contractors as any other contractor does.
This has shifted our focus into construction management where we can have the supply chain drive those packages to completion. It’s also allowed us to remove those hefty margins that the main contractors in the market charge us.”
Naturally, giga-projects such as this present not only challenges but lessons, and things have certainly been taken on board by RSG to allow the company to be even more effective and successful in the future.
“In a way, we are upscaling the supply chain. Those guys who never had a chance to work directly with a client, who previously weren’t perhaps paid on time by the contractor, can develop their businesses, and this is essentially a part of what we’re doing – upscaling the supply chain, upscaling the market, contributing to the GDP, not only by selling hotels and hotel room rates but also by upscaling the construction industry,” Faisal says.
New Concepts, New Standards
Because of the restrictions and difficulties of some of the environmental projects, new standards have been put in place by RSG, but how much has been imposed upon the company by the authorities and how much is self-imposed?
“I think our standards are well above what the local standards are,” Faisal begins. “The Saudi Building Code is comprehensive, so we created a bespoke building code that is a combination of the Saudi and international building codes. We did this because we want to put ourselves at a higher standard, and that’s what we now follow across all of our work.”
It’s the same with the environmental aspects. RSG began talking to the National Environmental Committee, which approves all of the company’s impact environmental assessments, four or five years ago to start creating a framework on how to manage environmental impact and monitoring. “Nothing had ever been built on a Saudi marine site before, so it was a new thing for them too,” Faisal says.
“Island development is a new concept in Saudi Arabia, especially in an environment that is considered so sensitive and home to some of the most endangered species in the world. Some species of migratory birds only come to this part of the Red Sea once a year. Therefore, we needed to consider all of these things and the environmental regulations that we are following are the first of their kind in the Kingdom.”
“We didn’t have to bring coral back into the lab and then back to the sea, it was from one point to another point”
A World First
RSG is nothing if not an innovative and forward-looking developer and is justly proud of a number of the initiatives it has introduced to the Red Sea, one of the most impressive being the relocation of coral.
“There is a very dense population of coral, and in certain areas where we need to develop, whether it’s subsea cabling or perhaps the bridge, there was coral in those locations,” Faisal explains. “As much as we tried to avoid certain places, there are some locations where it simply isn’t possible. That’s where the whole notion of taking coral from one location and replanting it in another location arose.
“Working with a lot of experts from around the world, we discovered that there was mixed success with the survival rate of the coral when moved. A lot of the time when you relocate coral from one environment to another, bringing it from an open sea environment to a lab environment, for instance, the changes in mineral content in the water, the temperature, and the salinity mean that the coral eventually dies.
“After maybe three and a half years of experimenting with small coral sample sizes, we finally found a method with a company by the name of Beacon Development to relocate a large volume of coral from one area of the sea to another. We didn’t have to bring coral back into the lab and then back to the sea, it was from one point to another point. We needed to check the mortality rate, in four and a half or five months, to see if the coral was acclimatizing to the conditions. If not, it would die. And it’s been nine months now and that program has been incredibly successful. That is a world first.”
The World Tourism Organization has called for the industry to look beyond visitor numbers and profit, and instead focus on the positive impact that healthy tourism can have on people, society and the environment. Red Sea Global can provide the blueprint for this vision.
Red Sea Global
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