Why launch an AI travel business in Saudi Arabia?

Ritesh Raj's Saudi-first go-to-market: local relevance before a global fight for OTA clicks.

Author

Tony Carne
November 24, 2026

Tony records this podcast and then his personal AI agent, Bax, takes over and does everything else. Follow Tony on LinkedIn to learn how you can maximise your usage of AI agents to remove the busy work. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-carne-b8851b6/ 

A better travel product still needs a way to reach customers.

The big OTAs have familiar brands, established habits and marketing budgets a startup cannot simply match. So where do you start?

Ritesh Raj’s answer is Saudi Arabia.

Need help finding the right AI solution for your travel business? Tell me what you are trying to solve and I’ll personally introduce you to someone who can help:

In this episode of the Everything AI in Travel podcast, the CuddlyNest co-founder and CEO explains the thinking behind Ewaa, a locally focused AI travel product built around a specific first market.

Riyadh is the main starting point. Jeddah and religious travel bring other local needs into the picture. And rather than simply buying the same traffic as Booking.com and Expedia, Ritesh describes a plan to reach people through everyday apps, services and relationships.

The wider ambition is there. But his sequence is to test Ewaa in Saudi Arabia, learn from it, and take those lessons into CuddlyNest’s next market.

That is the part that stayed with me. The first market is not only a place to put an AI product. It shapes how you build it, how you explain it and how people discover it.

We also get into the less visible work: connecting travel supply, turning a conversation into useful options, and letting someone change a package before booking it.

For anyone building in travel, the question is worth asking: where can you earn the right to be used before trying to be everywhere?

Ritesh describes plans and capabilities as they stood when we recorded, not a claim that the launch or later expansion has already happened.

Watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iEhZ0bwjk8k