It does not empty, it moves

For years I wrote the same sentence into summer plans. The Gulf empties in July.

I had it half right, and the half I had wrong was the expensive half.

Riyadh thins. You can see it on any road out of the city in the weeks after the Eid. But the families in those cars are not vanishing. They are going somewhere specific, and you can watch the same customer reappear a few hundred kilometres away with more time and a looser grip on the budget.

They reappear in Taif, up the escarpment from Makkah, where the air is ten degrees cooler and the fruit stalls are out along the road. In Abha and the mountains of Asir, where the Saudi summer has a season of its own. On the causeway to Bahrain on Thursday evening, and back across it on Saturday. In Salalah when the khareef arrives and the hills turn green in the drizzle. On Egypt's North Coast, at the next table to a Cairo family who drove up on Thursday.

None of it shows on a dashboard filtered to Riyadh. The customer left the postcode, and the plan was written for the postcode.

So, the correction. The Gulf does not empty in summer. It moves, and it moves along the same routes every year, which means the routes can be planned for. Where the customer will be in the third week of July is a list of places, and most of them have a menu, a hotel and a phone signal.

The brands that treat summer as an absence spend three months waiting for September. The brands that treat it as a map follow the customer to a mountain town or a green hillside or a beach, and meet them there, rested, with time to spend, in the one season when nobody is in a hurry.