Luxury Saudi Arabia Voyages

Jeddah's Al-Balad quarter is a labyrinth of coral-stone houses and carved wooden roshan balconies, newly UNESCO-listed and barely touched by tourism. Sip cardamom coffee in a merchant's courtyard, haggle in souks thick with oud and spice, then walk the corniche as the Red Sea turns molten at sunset. The historic gateway to Mecca, one of Arabia's most beguiling old cities, has opened to guests only recently and is reached by ship rarer still.

They call Umluj the Maldives of Arabia, and the comparison holds, powder-white cays scattered across water the color of raw turquoise. The swim platform folds down and you slip straight into a warm, empty sea, paddleboards on tap, no jetty and no other ship on the horizon. Umluj sits inside a Red Sea Project marine reserve, so motorized craft need the reserve's permission. Shebara's mirrored overwater villas shimmer in the distance. It is the barefoot heart of what an intimate yacht was built to do. Discover with SeaDream.

A historic Red Sea trading port that once supplied pilgrims traveling overland to Mecca, Yanbu's old town, Al-Balad, still holds coral-stone merchant houses several centuries old. The reef just offshore, part of the same system that runs the length of the Red Sea, remains far less dived than its Egyptian counterparts, and the beaches here are correspondingly quieter. A genuinely under-the-radar stop on Saudi Arabia's newly opening coast.