The flight from Jeddah to NEOM Bay Airport runs just 90 minutes. The airport is new, modern, and almost empty. The drive to the coast carries you through landscape that shifts from flat desert to dramatic sandstone formations within 20 minutes. NEOM occupies an area the size of Belgium and looks it — the scale is disorienting in the best way.
Hotels near the coast run comfortable but basic — expect around 850 SAR/night (~$225). Many rooms face the Red Sea, and the water delivers that deep, saturated blue only the Red Sea produces.
Day 2: Diving
Book a two-dive trip from Sharma with a local operator and you'll pay around 550 SAR. The boats are small — often just six divers. One dive master, a Saudi named Fahad, noted that the site ahead had been dived maybe 200 times total. "In Sharm el-Sheikh, that's one Tuesday," he said.
The reef is extraordinary. Hard coral grows in formations you won't have seen anywhere else — table corals the size of dining tables, untouched and complete. A Napoleon wrasse the size of a golden retriever hovers at the cleaning station. Visibility reaches 35+ meters, and you can watch the reef wall drop away below into the deep blue.
The second dive is often a shallow coral garden (8-12m) with more species diversity than you can count. No anchor damage. No broken coral. No discarded fishing line. It looks like what every reef must have looked like before humans showed up.
Day 3: Hisma Desert
A guided canyon hike runs about 400 SAR for a half-day. The Hisma desert within NEOM holds sandstone formations that echo Wadi Rum in Jordan, but without the tourist infrastructure. You hike through a narrow slot canyon where the walls rise 30 meters on both sides, the sandstone layered in reds, oranges, and whites.
Guides point out Nabataean rock inscriptions — ancient trading route markers from the same civilization that built Petra. These carvings are largely unstudied and unprotected. They sit in the desert where they've stood for 2,000 years, unmarked and unvisited.
The rust-red sandstone at golden hour is spectacular. The silence is absolute — no engine noise, no other groups, just wind and rock.
Day 4: Sharma Village
Sharma is a traditional fishing village on the NEOM coast. Coral-stone houses, fishing boats pulled up on the beach, the morning catch being sorted on the dock — it's a window into pre-development Saudi coastal life.
Eat at a simple seafood restaurant and you'll find grilled hammour (grouper) with rice and salad for around 45 SAR (~$12). The fish lands two hours from the sea. The room has plastic chairs and fluorescent lights, and it still turns out one of the best fish meals you'll have.
The contrast between Sharma's simplicity and The Line's $500-billion ambition, separated by maybe 50 km, is the most disorienting thing about NEOM.
Day 5: The Line Visitor Center
The visitor experience center is free and genuinely impressive — immersive screens, architectural models, and a VR experience of what The Line will look like when complete. Picture a 170 km mirrored structure, 500m tall, 200m wide, housing 9 million people with zero cars and AI-managed everything.
From designated viewpoints, you can see the actual construction: massive earthworks, crane forests, and the beginning of foundation structures stretching to the horizon. The scale is staggering. Whether it works as envisioned is still an open question. But seeing it in progress is unlike anything else on Earth.
Day 6: Snorkeling and Sunset
Keep one day gentle. Snorkel from a beach near the hotel, where the shallow reefs (3-5m) run healthy and colorful — parrotfish, surgeonfish, and the occasional curious moray eel that pokes its head out of a crevice to inspect your mask.
Then take the sunset from a cliff overlooking the Red Sea. The water turns from blue to gold to deep orange. The desert behind you stays silent. The only sound is waves on rock.
Day 7: Departure
On the flight back to Jeddah, look out the window and you can trace the NEOM coastline stretching south, the construction zones visible as geometric scars on the desert floor, and beyond them, untouched desert and reef continuing toward the horizon.
NEOM is one of the strangest places you can visit. It is simultaneously the ancient world (Nabataean carvings, fishing villages, pristine reefs) and the imagined future (The Line, AI cities, manufactured snow). Whether the future vision succeeds or not, the present reality — unspoiled diving, spectacular desert, authentic coastal culture — is worth the trip on its own terms.
For the diving deep-dive, read our NEOM Red Sea guide. For practical planning, see our NEOM FAQ. Al-Ula pairs naturally for anyone exploring Saudi Arabia's desert heritage.
