Soudah Peaks
About
Defining the F&B strategy and concept framework for a destination set to establish a new standard for mountain hospitality in the Kingdom.
Soudah Peaks is an ultra-luxury mountain resort destination in the Aseer region of Saudi Arabia, set at the highest altitudes in the Kingdom. Encompassing 10 world-class hotel brands across 4 distinct zones, Tahlal, Sabrah, Sahab, and Rijal, it is a destination being built without an existing culinary identity to reference and with no margin for the kind of misalignment that undermines destination dining at scale. Forsite's scope covered F&B master planning, market analysis, strategy, and concept development across both standalone venues and hotel dining.
The Challenge
Soudah Peaks is being developed as a destination without precedent in the Kingdom, which means its F&B identity has to be created entirely from intent rather than inherited from what already exists.
The client needed a framework that could govern 10 hotel brands and multiple standalone venues across 4 zones, each with its own topography, guest profile, and experiential character, while ensuring the destination reads as coherent and purposeful rather than fragmented. The pressure to embed authentic cultural and regional identity into a project of this commercial scale, without reducing it to surface-level aesthetics, made the brief significantly more demanding than a conventional F&B strategy assignment
The Approach
Forsite led a structured, insight-driven process working alongside AECOM, Parsons, JLL, and the Soudah Development Company. The scope was built around 3 interdependent workstreams: understanding what the market could support commercially, defining what each zone's distinct guest profile and topography demanded experientially, and translating both into a coherent F&B ecosystem where hotel and standalone venues were complementary by design rather than by chance.
The Aseer region's heritage, local ingredients, and relationship with the mountain landscape were not treated as a branding layer. They were embedded into the strategic logic, shaping which concepts were viable, where they were positioned across the destination, and how they would be experienced by guests arriving from across the world.
How did we design a place that works?
Designing against cannibalization
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Strategy rooted in place
The Aseer region's heritage, local ingredients, and mountain landscape were embedded into the strategic logic rather than applied as a branding layer. They shaped which concepts were viable, where they sat within the destination, and how they would resonate with guests.
Complexity managed at scale
Few F&B briefs operate at this level of simultaneous complexity, multiple hotel brands, multiple zones, multiple stakeholders, and a destination with no existing culinary precedent to reference. The process was structured to hold all of that together without losing sight of the guest experience at the centre of it.
The result
Few destinations at this scale get the F&B strategy right from the start. Most course-correct after opening, when the cost of getting it wrong is already visible. Soudah Peaks is being built with the framework in place first, and a culinary identity designed to last as long as the destination itself.