Red Sea Global Combines Luxury Travel with Sustainable Development Using Agentic AI

Nestled between Africa and Asia, the Red Sea is home to crystal-clear waters, vibrant coral reefs and pristine islands. It’s the perfect place for a luxury getaway and millions visit each year. But the tourism industry can often be a balancing act, where pleasure and profit can go hand-in-hand with environmental impacts.  

Red Sea Global (RSG), the company behind the new regenerative tourist destination on the west coast of Saudi Arabia, places sustainability and community impact at the heart of its operations. Its ambition is to become the world’s most responsible developer and have a positive impact on the people and places it touches. 

For the last year, RSG has used Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), to provide the insights needed to power its sustainable, luxury travel experiences.

Having the right information is vital for providing standout customer experiences. RSG collects huge amounts of data — around a billion rows — from various sources. The company monitors interactions from its customers at every possible touchpoint. But it also has data from IoT sensors that monitor things like irrigation and electricity use across its resorts. Further data streams give insight into operations to ensure development is completed sustainably, on time and within budget. 

However, the company’s data architecture was initially disconnected and inconsistent, containing dozens of different environments spun up to meet the needs of individual departments. This restricted RSG’s ability to gain the bird’s-eye view needed to understand and anticipate customer needs.

“Our goal is to create luxury destinations that people really want to visit,” says Ulysses Demos, Senior Director of the Data Management and Protection Office at Red Sea Global. “We have to fully understand the visitor journey to make experiences spectacular, so we needed a complete, 360-degree view of our operations.”

Demos needed a platform that would provide a central store for all the company’s data, making it accessible to every part of the business. But there were other considerations too. Firstly, RSG must meet the regulatory requirements of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, so governance and visitor privacy was a priority. Secondly, Demos wanted to deploy LLMs to allow internal users to interact with data without the support of the company’s data team, which is made up of only 12 people. With a team this size, not every department has access to a data analyst, so Demos knew that AI could enable more parity across its data landscape and remove barriers to insight.  

“We built our first local LLM in 2023 but couldn’t deploy it due to lacking the right supporting hardware,” says Demos. “So we started evaluating cloud platforms, because overall we needed a better location and the best home for our solution — that was Snowflake.”

Since 2023, RSG has used Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, on AWS, to host its data marketplace — a large catalogue of browsable data that is cleansed, traceable and available across the enterprise. One of the platform’s main attractions was how simple Snowflake made it to achieve the company’s goals.

“When choosing a data platform, we wanted to remove as many moving parts as we could to decrease complexity of the solution,” says Demos. “A lot of the other solutions we looked at weren’t provided by a single vendor. At one point the original solution contained over 35 different products, so you’d need a massive integration team to bring it all together. Not to mention the complexity, and overall risk of operationally supporting such a solution at scale.”

With a fully managed solution, RSG has removed any maintenance burden and operational overheads while ensuring seamless scalability and robust governance. Snowflake’s integration with Apache Iceberg tables — an open source table format that allows for greater transactional consistency, reliability and performance — was also a major advantage. Iceberg tables allow Demos to work with data in the format he wants without the need for complex transformations. 

“The Iceberg table format support was a real wow moment for me,” Demos says. “It gives us the capability to manage large-scale data lakes more reliably and efficiently.”

With all its data in one place, the next step for RSG was to put that data into the hands of its users. Using Cortex AI and a frontend interface in Streamlit, the company quickly and easily created multiple AI agents that work with different types of data across the organization. 

These agents take natural language queries and automatically turn them into SQL code. Data engineers could then directly access the results of those queries if they required, along with the code that retrieved them. Automating a lot of the heavy lifting involved in gaining insight, this practice continues to decrease operational effort every week.  

These agents are particularly valuable in departments that lack a dedicated data analyst. The agents allow users with no coding capabilities to access the data they need, which reduces the burden on RSG’s relatively small data team. But they also provide a level of insight that goes beyond simply responding to queries. 

“Without an analyst, users may not see the possible insights about what else they can dive into,” says Ulysses Demos, Senior Director of the Data Management and Protection Office at Red Sea Global. “With Cortex, we created a virtual data analyst that will answer specific questions, but also expand on those answers and suggest related trends. We then leveraged this concept and built an internal data governance agent to help us align the regulatory and legal aspects of NDMO and PDPL, the local data governance regulation and data privacy law. Currently, it even writes email responses for us.”

Available 24/7 and highly accurate, these agents are used to align operational activities across different resorts and locations. They also provide important insight into sustainability initiatives and enable marketing to better target and cater to visitors.

In fact, the visitor experience is one of the areas that has benefited most. Here, AI agents provide insight into various factors, from the comparative performance of different hotels to the demographics of visitors. These insights allow RSG to deliver the small touches that make its luxury experiences truly exceptional.

“There are countless permutations that make up a personalized visitor experience. But we couldn’t build a dashboard for each one,” says Demos. “We needed the flexibility to ask any questions of our data in natural language and get responses back — and that’s what Snowflake has given us.”

For RSG, Agentic AI provides a huge time saving and brings greater consistency to operations, which has a direct result on the services its customers receive. The company plans to continue providing agents to more departments, and with Snowflake supporting this initiative, it can do so quickly and easily — even with a small data team.

“Snowflake has had a monumental impact” says Ulysses. “From a data perspective, it's the backbone of everything we do. It’s changed what’s possible in the future, but also how we work, leverage AI solutions, and use our data every day.”