What I Understood About Qiddiya While Enjoying Disneyland Paris

I was in Paris with my six-year-old son. One day at Disneyland, Premier Access included, cost me about €600. I didn't think twice about it. I wasn't paying for a theme park. I was paying so my son could feel something — the wonder of it, without three hours in a queue to get there. That's what a destination actually sells. Not tickets. A feeling worth traveling for.

And standing there, I found myself thinking about Qiddiya. Not because the two projects look alike. Because watching Disneyland Paris work, up close, helped me understand what a destination actually is — and what it takes to build one.

A destination is not one thing. It's layers, added in the right order.

Disneyland Paris didn't start as a city. It started as a reason to come. One attraction, one story, one park. Then it needed a reason to stay — so hotels appeared, restaurants, small comforts for a family that wanted more than a day trip. Then it needed a reason to return — so it kept adding. New rides, new lands, more to discover, so a second visit didn't feel like repeating the first.

And only after all of that — after enough people had come, stayed, returned, spent, worked there, fell a little bit in love with the place — did the last layer arrive. People started asking: why not live here?

That's the layer nobody plans for at the beginning, and it's the layer that turns a destination into a place. Val d'Europe today isn't a Disney park with hotels around it. It's a real town — homes, schools, offices, businesses, families who have never bought a park ticket in their life but live there because the place became worth living in.

That took over twenty years to build. Layer by layer, on purpose, never rushed.

This is what made me look at Qiddiya differently.

Qiddiya has the hardest layer already — the reason to come. Six Flags, Aquarabia, sport, culture, entertainment — a real anchor, at real scale. What I find genuinely exciting is that it isn't trying to copy Disney's layers one by one. It's building its own version of the same logic, with its own identity, at a size Disneyland Paris never attempted.

And then, while I was writing this, Qiddiya announced it's exploring a destination in France with the French government.

At first that surprised me. (how did they know I was writing about Paris and Qiddiah parallels, was my first question :) Then it made complete sense.

Because the benefit runs in both directions.

For France, it's straightforward — a new destination means new investment, new jobs, new reasons for the world to look at a region, the same engine that turned the fields outside Paris into Val d'Europe.

But the more interesting question, the one I kept circling, is what it does for Qiddiya to build something in Paris.

I think it's this: a destination proves itself by being tested somewhere else. Qiddiya City is the vision at home — bold, ambitious, still being written. A project in France is the same vision, placed inside one of the most demanding, most mature tourism markets in the world. If the idea works there too, it's no longer just a Saudi ambition. It's a model. Something that travels.

That's what a strong idea does. It doesn't just occupy a site. It proves it can live somewhere else, in a different culture, under different expectations, and still hold.

And this, to me, is the real estate lesson underneath all of it.

We spend a lot of time asking what a piece of land is worth. The more useful question — the one Disneyland Paris answers so clearly if you look at what grew up around it — is what becomes possible because something exists. The hotels, the homes, the offices in Val d'Europe weren't the plan on day one. They were what the destination made room for, once enough of it had come together in the right order.

That's the gap I look for in every project, real estate or otherwise: not what's missing in the budget or the design, but what's missing in the story everyone is supposedly building toward. Get that right, layer by layer, and the rest — the homes, the value, the city — has somewhere to grow.