When most people think about a theme park launch, they think about rides. Engineers think about something else: platforms, scale, latency, identity, transactions, orchestration.
And at the scale of Qiddiya City, those things aren’t secondary. They’re foundational.
Qiddiya City, Saudi Arabia’s ambitious destination for entertainment, sports, and culture is not building a park. It’s building a City of Play & Life by 2030. That changes the technology conversation entirely.
From day one, the mandate wasn’t “launch Six Flags.” It was: design the digital backbone of a future city.
The Real Challenge: Avoiding “Ten Systems That Don’t Talk”
Large destinations usually evolve organically:
- Separate ticketing systems
- Standalone loyalty programs
- Disconnected payment gateways
- Operational tools that barely integrate
The result? Technical debt from day one. Qiddiya City chose a different path. Instead of stitching together vendors and legacy solutions, the strategy was clear: One unified digital platform. Built for scale. Built for growth.
A single backbone designed to:
- Orchestrate the entire guest journey, from planning to post-visit engagement
- Enable flexible commerce (bundles, dynamic pricing, multi-asset experiences)
- Digitize operational workflows across parks and services
- Centralize identity, data, and transactions
This isn’t system integration. It’s platform architecture by design.
Day One Was Never the Finish Line
When Six Flags Qiddiya City opened its gates, it wasn’t just a park going live. It was the first real-world validation of a digital foundation designed to scale far beyond a single asset.
From our perspective at Globant, the challenge was never about launching a website or an app. It was about asking the right questions early, the ones that shape systems for years, not months.
What does a perfect guest journey look like when you design it from scratch?
Instead of adapting technology to legacy constraints, we had the opportunity to design the journey with the guest at the center from day one. Planning. Arrival. Exploration. Transactions. Post-visit engagement.
Each touchpoint needed to feel connected, not stitched together. The goal wasn’t to digitize steps. It was to orchestrate them.
Identity, context, and interaction flow naturally across the experience. When done right, technology disappears. The journey feels intuitive.
Commerce Without Breaking the Magic
In large-scale destinations, commerce often lives as a separate layer: a checkout page, a payment gateway, a transactional interruption. We approached it differently.
Commerce had to be embedded into the experience itself. Flexible enough to support evolving offerings. Invisible enough to preserve immersion. Not a bolt-on, but part of the ecosystem’s fabric. When transactions become contextual and seamless, they stop feeling like transactions.
They become part of the story.
Designing a System That Learns
A destination of this scale isn’t static. Visitor behavior shifts. Peak days stress the infrastructure. New assets come online. Complexity compounds.So the digital foundation couldn’t just support opening day. It had to enable adaptability.
That meant designing an operating model that learns in the real world, continuously evolving with usage patterns, operational insights, and new experiences layered on top.
Day one was proof. The ecosystem is the mission.
The Architectural Principle: Build for Exponential Reuse
The most expensive mistake in large-scale destinations isn’t bad code. It’s building systems that can’t be reused. The blueprint created for Six Flags, and by extension all Qiddiya, ensures that:
- New assets inherit existing identity models
- Commerce scales without re-platforming
- Data remains unified
- Operational logic can be extended, not rebuilt
This is how you avoid exponential complexity as you scale. And this is where long-term ROI is created. Not at launch, but across decades.The collaboration between Globant and Qiddiya is grounded in a simple principle:
A digital platform should not support opening day. It should support the next 30 years. Six Flags Qiddiya is the first proof point. The City of Life is the horizon.
For technical leaders, the takeaway is clear:
If you’re building something meant to scale, Don’t architect for the asset.Architect for the ecosystem.
