Q1. El Gouna Red Sea has grown into a fully-fledged town of over 25,000 residents from more than 50 nationalities. What's the thinking behind building an entire town rather than a resort destination, and how do you protect that identity as El Gouna Red Sea keeps expanding?

That's really the whole philosophy in one sentence. A resort gives you a reason to come once. A town gives you a reason to live here, in July as much as in December, for a wedding as much as a holiday, to raise your kids in as much as to escape to. And a big part of what makes people come back is that El Gouna Red Sea has its own identity. It's not trying to copy anyone else. You can find total quiet on a lagoon in the morning, be at a beach party by sunset, and sit down for dinner on the marina in the evening, all within the same town, all designed with the same sensibility that's been consistent since the very first buildings went up.

I also think El Gouna was a pioneer in this region in what working with intention could do for a place. We didn't wait for the industry to prove it out somewhere else first. We have El Gouna Film Festival, we built a big music scene (e.g. with Sandbox), we invested in design and architecture as a language for the town, at a point when most developments on the Red Sea were thinking purely about beds and beaches. That head start is a big part of why the cultural calendar today feels so natural here instead of bolted on

You can see it in the numbers too: 2025 revenues were up close to a third on the year before, and occupancy climbed even as we grew. But honestly, what I actually pay attention to isn't a number on that page. It's whether the town still feels like El Gouna Red Sea. Growth is easy. Growth that doesn't dilute what people fell in love with in the first place is the hard part. So as we expand, every new hotel or residential launch has to earn its place. It needs to add something the town doesn't already have, not just add square meters.

Q2. You recently signed Sofitel as an operator of your flagship coastal hotel and launched Marina Island by Tuban in May 2026. What does the next chapter of El Gouna Red Sea's hospitality and development strategy look like?

A lot of what we do now is really about building on the legacy we already have, and about continuity. People choose El Gouna Red Sea because it feels like home, and our job is to keep making that feeling easier to hold onto as life changes for them. Marina Island by Tuban is a good example of what that looks like in practice. We think of it as the new heart of El Gouna Red Sea, a district built entirely around the marina, with a full lifestyle woven around it, waterfront dining, curated retail, residences that look out onto the water rather than being built near it.

Sofitel fits into that same idea, just from a different angle. It's not a renovation to us, it's bringing together two brands that share the same values, El Gouna Red Sea's sense of place and Sofitel's sense of French elegance and hospitality craft.

Our residential pipeline is following that same logic of quality over quantity. SIBA El Gouna Red Sea brings together a few very different architectural voices under one masterplan, the Triangle Villa with London's Unknown Works, which plays with how indoor and outdoor space blend together, the Tandem Villa with Block722, built around that balance of privacy and community you get with twin villas, and now the CANOPY Villa, another collaboration with Unknown Works that pushes the architectural range even further.

None of this works long term, though, if we're not equally deliberate about what runs underneath the town, and that's really where our sustainability strategy comes in. A town this size needs to think about its own energy, water, and waste the same way it thinks about its next hotel or residential launch, not as an afterthought once everything else is built. Solarize-2, our solar power plant station, recently started operating as part of that strategy, following Solarize-1, which launched back in 2022

The thread running through all of it is the same: every new addition has to bring something the town doesn't already have. As El Gouna Red Sea matures, our job isn't to make it bigger. It's to make it richer.

Q3. El Gouna Red Sea operates hotels, manages residential communities, and runs the infrastructure of daily life for its residents, all under one roof. How does being both the town's developer and its operator shape decisions that a standalone hotel group or real estate developer wouldn't have to make?

It changes everything about how we make decisions, honestly. Most developers build an asset, sell it or hand it to an operator, and move to the next one. We don‘t operate like that. We're running the town long after the ribbon-cutting, the way a municipality would, not the way a developer typically does, so every decision gets judged not just on what it earns in year one, but on what it does to the place over the next twenty years.

That's really the difference between running a town and running a portfolio of assets. We built a hospital, schools, marinas, golf courses, hotels, a full infrastructure of daily life, because our job was never just to fill rooms, it was to make a place people could actually live in. And once people are living here, they tend not to leave. They come for a holiday, they buy a home a few years later, their kids end up going to school here. That cycle, of a visitor becoming a resident, is something a standalone hotel group simply isn't set up to think about, because their relationship with a guest ends at checkout. Ours doesn't.

We hear what people need directly, from residents, homeowners, the businesses here, and we act on it through Orascom Property Management for rentals and maintenance, and El Gouna Plus for anyone designing their space with one of our renowned designers

It's the product of thinking about the town first, and everything else, hospitality and real estate included, as something that has to earn its place within it. So I'd say the real advantage isn't that we build hotels and homes. It's that we think like the people who'll still be living here in ten years, because we will be too.

Q4. Wellness has always been part of how El Gouna Red Sea is lived, and the town is now becoming a natural home for senior living too. What's driving that, and where does wellness fit into the future of the destination?

Wellness was never something we fitted in, it's been there since the first masterplan, in how walkable the town is, how much outdoor space there is, how easy it is to be active here. What's changed is that people now expect that to be more intentional. So we're formalizing something that was already true about El Gouna Red Sea, rather than inventing something new.

I actually think what we offer goes beyond wellness in the way people usually mean it. I'd call it peace of mind, or what we like to think of as the "El Gouna state of mind". People come here and get the infrastructure of a city, a hospital, schools, restaurants, a real economy, without carrying the stress that usually comes with city life. There's something about being surrounded by water, moving around a town built at a human scale, knowing your neighbours, that settles people in a way that's both physical and mental. We've looked at research recently on how people abroad feel about community and belonging, and the numbers are honestly stark, a lot fewer people feel connected to where they live than they did even a year before, and only a small fraction feel they truly belong somewhere. It's what happens when places aren't designed with belonging or wellbeing in mind from the start. El Gouna was.

A meaningful segment of the people who live in El Gouna Red Sea today are retirees, people who came for a holiday years ago and decided this was where they wanted to spend the next chapter. Their expectations are changing too, they want community and independence and access to good healthcare, not the traditional idea of a care facility. And honestly, we're one of the few places positioned to meet that properly, because the infrastructure already exists. We have the hospital, the hospitality, the residential communities, the social life. We're not starting from zero, we're building on a town that already works for them.

So I don't think about wellness as a category we're adding to the business. It's closer to a lens we look through on everything, how we design homes, how we think about hospitality, how we plan the next phase of the town. It shows up everywhere once you start looking for it, and at the heart of it is that same idea, giving people peace of mind, in a place that feels calm by design.