Saudi Arabia wants its tourism industry to be machine-readable

Picture yourself getting to Riyadh with no plan in mind. You say to your AI assistant, “I have three days, and I’d like something surprising, culturally rich and not too crowded; I’m prepared to spend more money if it’s worthwhile.”

You don’t open a dozen tabs. You don’t compare hotel reviews. You don’t search Instagram for restaurant recommendations. You don’t check whether the museum is open or whether your airport transfer connects with your hotel check-in. Your agent does.

It talks to an airline agent, a hotel agent and a destination agent. Perhaps it finds an attraction in Diriyah, a restaurant in Riyadh and a mobility service. It checks availability, weighs your preferences, makes trade-offs and books what you approve. Depending on how much autonomy you give it, it could book everything itself.

Your trip is shown in your calendar and the human interface is mostly gone. Although that might seem like just a consumer technology experiment, in Saudi Arabia it is starting to take on the character of an infrastructure issue.

The Agentic Tourism Corridor at LEAP 2026 suggests a profound transformation in how the travel economy operates.

WOULD YOU CREATE THE COMPANY THE SAME WAY?

Saudi Arabia is no longer trying to prove it can attract tourists. It aims to mechanize tourism on an enormous scale.

The Kingdom welcomed approximately 116 million domestic and inbound tourists in 2024, according to the Saudi Ministry of Tourism, while international tourists reached around 30 million.

Tourism spending was approximately SAR284 billion.

Having achieved its earlier target of 100 million tourists well ahead of schedule, Saudi Arabia has raised its 2030 goal to 150 million visitors. The tourism market is not just being digitized bit by bit. Instead, a new tourism economy is being built as the market grows.

In mature destinations, digital transformation often means connecting legacy airlines, hotel systems, ticketing platforms, loyalty programs, government databases and booking engines built at different times by different companies.

While Saudi Arabia has a certain level of complexity, it also has a feature that many well-established tourism markets lack: the opportunity to develop major components of the visitor economy simultaneously.

For Federico Pienovi, CEO of APAC and MENA at Globant, that is precisely the opportunity.

He draws an analogy with the arrival of the internet. “When we started talking about digital transformation, we were thinking about how you would have an enterprise in an era where the internet already existed,” he says. “If I need to create a bank today, would I ever think about having a branch? Maybe not.”

The same question, he argues, should now be applied to tourism. “If you need to build a new company today, a tourism company, would you create the company the same way you created the travel agency 20 years ago? Probably not.”

Today’s AI travel tools still frequently behave like extremely fast humans. Give an AI browser agent a request to find a trip and it can navigate websites, scrape information, fill in forms and return the results.

But why make machines imitate the way humans use the internet in the first place? “Agentic systems can talk to each other and can create an ecosystem,” Pienovi says.

Imagine one agent representing a Red Sea resort and another representing an airline. The resort agent can ask whether the airline has availability for a particular traveler. The airline can respond with available dates. The resort can then factor those dates into the stay.

Then more information enters the conversation.

“Federico travels with his four kids, so he needs X, Y and Z,” Pienovi says. The system can keep building the trip around those requirements without requiring a human to manually stitch the pieces together.

“We’re fundamentally trying to redefine what an OTA, a travel agency, or a destination is about,” he says.

FROM AI CONCIERGE TO AI ECOSYSTEM

Saudi tourism has already been experimenting with AI-powered personalization. The Saudi Tourism Authority, for example, introduced Sara, an AI-powered digital human designed to act as a travel companion, offering multilingual recommendations based on Saudi tourism data and visitor preferences.

But that largely preserves the traditional architecture of travel. A human asks, AI recommends, the human chooses and the human books.

Agentic tourism proposes something more radical. The agent asks. Other agents coordinate, systems transact and the human approves.

The Agentic Tourism Corridor is being positioned as an early implementation of that idea: a network in which AI agents can communicate across tourism entities, understand their respective data and capabilities, and construct experiences across destinations.

Globant says the initial corridor connects destinations such as the Red Sea and AlUla, while the wider initiative involves players such as King Salman International Airport, Riyadh Air, AWS, and other tourism and technology organizations.

“The corridor that we announced is about the first MVP of two entities talking to each other, knowing their data, knowing their customer preferences, knowing their availability, their stock, and basically creating a trip for you between the Red Sea and AlUla,” Pienovi says.

The significance lies in what happens when two becomes 20 or 200.

Travel already contains plenty of intelligence. But the problem is that these systems generally don’t behave as a single organism.

Today, the traveler connects those dots. In an agentic model, software could do it. That is why the technical language around agent-to-agent communication (A2A) and protocols such as MCP matters but is ultimately less interesting than the business model they enable.

The real prize is not getting two AI systems to talk. It is getting the tourism economy to transact through those conversations. Pienovi believes that it could also change the role of people inside tourism companies.

“Empowering people to move out of the back office, where you are looking at spreadsheets and dashboards and reporting on finance, to bring those people in front of the customer to create a better experience, that’s the end objective.”

In this vision, AI doesn’t necessarily remove people from tourism. It removes some of the work involved in connecting systems, allowing people to focus on the parts of hospitality that actually require humans.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE MIDDLE MEN? 

There is an obvious question hanging over the proposition: what happens to the intermediary?

For decades, online travel agencies such as Booking.com and Agoda have built enormous businesses by aggregating fragmented supply and becoming the interface through which travelers search, compare and transact.

What happens when the traveler doesn’t search? Pienovi doesn’t predict that these companies will simply disappear. He expects them to rethink their role.

“They have relationships with several providers that create and give them their availability, their auxiliaries and so on, but in a totally different way,” he says.

The future he describes is simple from the traveler’s perspective. “The only thing that you do is open an app and say, ‘I want to go to Saudi.’ And the rest is a conversation between agentic systems that at the end creates a proposal for you and can even transact for you.”

The agents buy the flight, book the hotel and secure the experiences. That creates a new strategic question for every intermediary: what exactly is your value when the consumer no longer needs to navigate your interface?

“They will need to rethink their business,” Pienovi says. “They will need to rethink how they interact. They will need to rethink how they are perceived by the customers, because AI is taking over, conversation is taking over interfaces.”

According to Pienovi, the app itself may begin to fade. “We used to have a lot of apps,” he says. “I believe more and more we’re going to stop having so many apps because we’re going to have very few apps, but they’re going to be all connected behind with the data and capabilities through agentic systems.”

The interface, in his view, returns to something much older than the smartphone. “Our language.”

WHO OWNS THE TRAVELER?

Every major shift in travel distribution has changed who controls the relationship with the traveler, from travel agents to booking websites, OTAs, search engines and mobile apps.

The agentic era could create another redistribution of power. If an AI agent makes the decision, who owns the customer? Pienovi sees a related issue as one of the defining challenges of the AI era: data sovereignty.

“The huge issue that every company has now is the sovereignty of their data,” he says. “What asset the company now has is data.”

Companies want AI to make use of their data. But if they simply hand that data to an external model, they may lose control over how it is used or incorporated into a broader system.

“I’m giving up my data for free. I have zero control over the sovereignty of my company,” Pienovi says.

The issue is particularly sensitive in tourism, where data can reveal where people travel, what they spend, who they travel with, what they prefer and how frequently they return.

In an agentic ecosystem, that data becomes the fuel for personalization and potentially one of the system’s most valuable assets.

THE 20 TO 30 PERCENT QUESTION

There is also a commercial argument behind the proposition. Globant has projected that cross-destination agent-to-agent interactions could increase total trip value by 20 to 30 percent.

The interesting question is where that additional value comes from.

Consider the Red Sea and AlUla as two connected destinations. A traveler has booked a massage at the Red Sea. The system knows that preference. When the traveler moves on to AlUla, the AlUla agent could suggest another treatment, perhaps with a discount.

“That’s an uplift in revenue that wasn’t there before these two systems started talking to each other,” Pienovi says.

The same logic could apply to hotel upgrades, additional experiences and future trips. A year later, an agent might recognize that the traveler typically takes a three-night trip with their spouse and prefers a particular departure airport. It could proactively suggest a flight and destination.

“The limits of personalization across assets and across players are going to benefit every single person,” Pienovi says.

The agent isn’t merely optimizing the trip. It is creating new transactions inside the trip.

WHY SAUDI ARABIA?

Saudi Arabia’s diverse portfolio of emerging destinations makes it an obvious laboratory for agentic tourism. AlUla, Diriyah, the Red Sea, Qiddiya and NEOM are all being developed at scale.

But when asked why Saudi was the right market, Pienovi gave a different answer. “It had nothing to do with that,” he says. “To be honest. It had to do with leadership.”

Building an interoperable tourism network requires government agencies, infrastructure operators, technology companies and destination developers to align around standards and participate in the same ecosystem.

In most markets, that is difficult. “When you have such a bold vision, anywhere in the world, convincing the government, convincing a minister, convincing entities to align behind this, I cannot tell you how difficult it is,” Pienovi says.

Saudi’s investment architecture changes that equation. Pienovi points to the Kingdom’s position across large parts of the tourism value chain, through PIF and government entities, including airlines, airports, destinations, mobility and financial infrastructure.

“They own the destinations. They own Red Sea, Qiddiya, Diriyah, and many others. They also own transportation channels across these locations. They own banks to facilitate FX and payments.”

For an MVP, that concentration of assets is powerful. “You say, okay, there’s no place that an MVP can have such a big impact as in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

The Kingdom’s scale and willingness to experiment can attract the global technology companies required to make the model portable.

“They see the tremendous potential of this, not only as a Saudi initiative, but as a Saudi initiative exported to the world.”

THE BIGGEST TRANSFORMATION MAY BE INVISIBLE

The most interesting future for Saudi tourism may not be a humanoid concierge standing in a hotel lobby. It may be something much less visible.

An AI agent notices that your flight is delayed. Another realizes your room will not be ready. A third finds an available experience nearby. A fourth arranges transport. Your loyalty agent negotiates an upgrade.

You simply receive a notification: “Your afternoon changed. We’ve taken care of it.” That is the promise of agentic tourism.

Saudi Arabia has spent the past decade building the physical infrastructure for a new tourism industry. The next phase could be about building its digital nervous system.

If that works, the Kingdom won’t simply have destinations that use AI. It will boast destinations built to be operated by it. And that would make Saudi Arabia an unusually important place to watch.

Not just for the future of travel, but for the future of how entire industries transact when the interface between a human and a business is no longer a website, an app, or even a person.

It is an agent.