Saudi Arabia is not a travel market that announces itself quietly. The Kingdom has nearly 100 percent internet connectivity, a population where more than 60 percent are under the age of 35, and a government that has staked a significant portion of its economic diversification strategy on making the country one of the world’s leading tourism destinations by 2030. The travel distribution infrastructure serving that market is being rebuilt in real time, and the companies competing to control it are moving fast.
Understanding who actually sells airline seats in Saudi Arabia, and on what terms, matters well beyond the Kingdom’s borders. Saudi Arabia is the largest travel market in the GCC by demand-side volume, ahead of the UAE. Its OTA air gross booking value reached 1.9 billion dollars in 2024. The online travel market overall is forecast to grow from 5.8 billion dollars in 2025 to 13 billion dollars by 2034, at a compound annual rate of 9.41 percent. Those numbers put Saudi Arabia in the same conversation as major established travel markets, not as an emerging economy curiosity but as a primary distribution battleground where the outcome of the NDC transition will be determined at meaningful commercial scale.
For airlines, the objective is not merely lower distribution costs but greater control over merchandising, ancillary sales and personalised offers. NDC is the infrastructure through which that control becomes possible at scale. In Saudi Arabia, the OTAs that access that infrastructure first will gain a material commercial advantage over those that do not.
The market has one dominant player and a set of credible challengers. Almosafer, a wholly owned subsidiary of the publicly listed Seera Group, commands 61 percent of OTA air gross booking value in the Kingdom, with a gross booking value of 1.2 billion dollars in 2024 and total bookings rising 8 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2025. It operates hotels, corporate travel, religious tourism, destination management and consumer flight bookings, and maintains physical storefronts for travellers who want a curated in-person experience. What makes Almosafer particularly significant from a distribution perspective is the NDC commitment it formalised in partnership with Amadeus in November 2025. The two companies announced an expanded collaboration focused on NDC adoption, with Almosafer positioning itself to lead the Kingdom in scaling modern content distribution in collaboration with airlines. The stated ambition is to create a flagship NDC use case that can serve as a model for the broader Middle East. That framing is not incidental. When the Kingdom’s largest OTA describes its NDC strategy as infrastructure for Saudi Arabia’s tourism transformation, it signals that distribution modernisation has become a national priority rather than a technology procurement decision.
The second player in the market requires some unpacking. Wego, which holds approximately 35 percent of the GCC metasearch market, acquired Cleartrip’s Middle East business from Flipkart in 2022, a transaction that included Flyin, previously one of the leading independent OTAs in Saudi Arabia. Cleartrip had originally acquired the Riyadh-based Flyin in 2018. The result is that what were once three distinct brands now represent two competitive positions under Wego’s ownership. Wego operates the metasearch layer, aggregating content from more than 700 airlines. Flyin handles transactions and serves a corporate travel segment with specific B2B requirements. The model is built around content aggregation, which creates a structural NDC challenge that the Almosafer partnership with Amadeus does not face in the same way. Metasearch platforms must increasingly aggregate both traditional GDS and NDC-sourced content simultaneously to maintain genuine fare transparency for users. Where airlines are concentrating their most competitive and personalised offers in NDC channels, a platform that cannot access that layer is no longer showing its users the full market. It is showing them a partial picture and calling it a comparison.
Almatar, backed by the Saudi Tourism Development Fund, is the second largest OTA in the Kingdom with a gross booking value of 320 million dollars in 2024. Its government backing positions it as a national distribution asset alongside Almosafer rather than simply a commercial competitor. How Almatar approaches NDC connectivity in the coming two years will be worth watching closely, particularly as the carriers it depends on deepen their own retailing transitions.
On the airline side, that transition is already well advanced. Saudia, the national flag carrier, has contracted Amadeus Nevio and began translating traditional booking records into Orders in July 2025, moving toward a fully integrated retailing model. Riyadh Air launched in May 2026 with an Offer and Order architecture from day one, with NDC content distributed simultaneously through Sabre, Amadeus, Travelport and Verteil. Together, the two carriers that dominate Saudi domestic and international capacity are both actively pursuing modern retailing on parallel tracks, one migrating from legacy infrastructure, the other having never operated without it.
The consequences for OTAs are direct. An OTA or metasearch platform that cannot access Riyadh Air’s full NDC content will be showing users a stripped version of a carrier that plans to connect Riyadh to more than 100 destinations by 2030. As Saudia’s retailing transformation deepens, the same dynamic will apply to the flag carrier. At that combined scale, incomplete content access is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural competitive disadvantage in the market’s most important booking category.
Saudi travellers have shown a consistent preference for homegrown brands over global OTA players. Almosafer, Almatar and Flyin all benefit from that local affinity in ways that Booking.com and Expedia have found difficult to overcome in the flight booking segment. That preference creates a specific dynamic for the NDC transition: the platforms most likely to succeed in distributing NDC content at scale in Saudi Arabia are the same local brands that Saudi carriers have the strongest commercial relationships with. The transition will not be driven from outside. It is being built from within, by Saudi-owned and Saudi-backed platforms, in partnership with the technology providers that have the deepest regional presence.
The Saudi OTA market is not waiting for NDC to mature. The demand is there, the capital is there, and the government intent is clear. The distribution infrastructure is catching up fast, and the airlines making the most ambitious retailing bets in the region are making it progressively more expensive to stay on legacy content access alone.
