I have just come back from a week in Saudi Arabia with Leylaty Group, on the ground in Jeddah and Riyadh ahead of the launch of Leylaty Rewards. I have worked in the Gulf for a few years now and I thought I had a feel for the scale of hospitality in the region. Saudi recalibrated that.
What Leylaty does
Leylaty is not a restaurant group in the way a UK operator would recognise one. There are restaurants, and good ones. Toki and Kuuru are the kind of venues that would hold their own in London or Dubai. But alongside the dining there is a catering and events operation on a scale I had not seen before. The ballrooms are enormous. Not large. Enormous. A single event can seat more guests than some of the restaurant groups I have worked with serve in a day, and the standard of service in those rooms is as high as in the restaurants.
So the loyalty brief was unusual. A programme that works for a couple having dinner at Toki on a Thursday night, and also for the family booking a wedding for a thousand guests. Same brand, same recognition, very different transactions.
A week on the floor
We spent the week training staff. Not managers in a meeting room, though we did that too, but the people who will actually sign guests up, explain the programme, and handle the moment when a member asks why their reward has not appeared. Servers, hosts, event coordinators, the teams who run the ballroom floor.
It is the part of a launch I would never delegate. The programme lives or dies on whether the person at the table can explain it in one sentence and believe in it. You cannot find that out from Dubai. You find it out by standing in a venue in Jeddah at the end of a shift and listening to the questions.
The questions were good. The teams were sharp, engaged, and quicker to pick up the mechanics than many I have trained in the UK. Several had thoughts about how the rewards should work that we have taken back into the roadmap.
Digital as premium as physical
The goal we set at the start was simple to state and hard to deliver: the digital experience has to be as premium as the physical hospitality. Leylaty’s venues are beautiful. The service is attentive in a way that is specific to Saudi hospitality, generous and unhurried. A loyalty app that feels like a utility bill would be an insult to that.
So a great deal of the work has gone into the small things. The way a reward is presented. The language in the notifications, in Arabic and in English. The speed of sign-up, because nobody at a wedding is going to fill in a long form. The way the programme recognises a guest across restaurants and events without making them feel tracked.
The scale of KSA
Hospitality in the Kingdom is growing at a pace that is hard to describe without sounding breathless, so I will keep it plain. There are more openings, more venues, more guests and more ambition than any market I have worked in. The operators are investing in standards, not just square footage. And they are early enough in their loyalty journey that the decisions being made now will shape the guest experience for years.
That is a privilege and a responsibility. If you are an operator in the region thinking about loyalty, my advice from this week is: start with the floor team, build for the guest who comes back, and make the digital experience worthy of the room. Everything else follows.
Thank you to the Leylaty team for the welcome and the hospitality, which was, as expected, exceptional. Launch is close. More when it is live.
If any of this is relevant to your estate, get in touch. There is more writing here, and the studio behind the work is TheLoyaltyCo.