The business of letting strangers into your home: Meet Saudi Arabia's HiHome

Most travel keeps you at arm's length from a place - you observe it, photograph it, pass through it. Something else happened on a trip to Cuba, when the journey led Alsadoun not to a hotel but into a stranger's home. "I wasn't just visiting places or seeing the usual tourist attractions," she says. "I was sitting with a local family, sharing food, having conversations, and getting a glimpse into their everyday life. That personal connection made me understand the culture in a way that a typical tourist experience never could."

Home in Riyadh, she couldn't shake one question: why should a visitor to Saudi Arabia be issued a hotel key, when they might instead be issued a door? Out of that thought came HiHome, a platform built on exactly that premise - an invitation into a house rather than a hotel lobby. Its very first door belonged, fittingly, to her own father. “It was not a conventional business concept, and there were naturally questions about whether people would actually want to enter a Saudi family's home," she says. He said yes regardless. “We weren't asking other Saudi families to open their doors before we were willing to open ours."

HiHome launched in 2019, the very year Saudi Arabia began issuing tourist visas for the first time in its modern history. The flattering shorthand of luck gets waved away. "The timing created an opportunity, but the people, hosts, and experiences are what made the idea meaningful," Alsadoun says.

Then came the year that tested the whole premise to its foundations. Covid dissolved the very ground the business stood on. "Our entire model depended on travel, gatherings, and people coming together, and suddenly all of that stopped," she says. "There was so much uncertainty." What returned, once the world reopened, was something sharper than simple appetite. "People weren't only looking for destinations," she says. "They were looking for connections and experiences that felt real."

The thornier negotiation was not with a pandemic but with an inheritance. Saudi hospitality is governed by hafawah - a generosity so total it disdains the idea of return - and some hosts balked at being paid at all. "Some people were initially uncomfortable with the idea of receiving payment because, in their minds, they were simply welcoming guests," Alsadoun says. The argument was reframed rather than won: "There is a difference between selling hospitality and valuing someone's contribution."

The same care governs what a host is permitted to become. Nothing is rehearsed, nothing repeated to formula. "For me, authenticity doesn't mean having no structure," she says. "It means creating the right structure around the host's real personality, culture, and way of life. We never want hosts to memorise a script or tell the same story in exactly the same way."

What tends to happen across the table is something close to a small demolition. Guests arrive carrying an idea of the kingdom assembled from headlines and transit lounges, and rarely does it survive dinner intact. "Guests come with one image of Saudi Arabia and leave with a very different one," Alsadoun says. The correction runs both ways. Years spent crossing other people's thresholds have unsettled her own certainties about the country she was born into. "The more hosts we meet, the more I realise there isn't one single definition of what Saudi culture looks like," she says. "We aren't trying to present one version of Saudi Arabia. We are creating space for people to share their own version of it."

It is nearly impossible to discuss the business without the country's grander narrative drifting into the room - Vision 2030, the sweeping reimagining of what Saudi Arabia is now permitted to become. "Today, because of the changes happening through Vision 2030, there is much more space for entrepreneurship, tourism, cultural experiences, and new businesses to grow," Alsadoun says. "As a female founder, I'm especially proud to be part of this change." She is careful, though, never to let HiHome be mistaken for a rival to the kingdom's vast, state-backed developments. "HiHome focuses on something much more intimate - the people and communities behind the destination," she says. "I believe these different parts of the tourism ecosystem complement each other."

Scale is where the whole proposition sharpens into a dilemma, because what's being sold was never built to multiply in the ordinary sense. Speaking at WTM Spotlight Riyadh in September, Alsadoun made the case for co-creation rather than imposing a model designed elsewhere. "For HiHome, technology allows us to scale, but human connection is what defines the product," she says. It is a distinction that separates HiHome from the conventional technology platforms investors may be accustomed to backing. "A venture capital-backed technology company may be built with the goal of reaching millions of users and processing thousands or even millions of orders through a highly automated platform. That kind of scale is possible when the product itself can be delivered almost entirely through technology."

HiHome, she argues, cannot be built on the same premise. Before an experience can be offered, the team must understand the host's personality, family, home and what they feel comfortable sharing, alongside what the guest hopes to find. The difference becomes clearest around a dinner table. "If a guest is visiting a Saudi family for a private dinner, the experience is not simply about booking a table. It is about who is welcoming them, the stories they hear, the food they share, the conversations they have, and how comfortable both sides feel."

The solution, as Alsadoun sees it, is not to resist outside investment but to bring different strengths together. "Investors and venture capital partners can bring technology, capital, infrastructure, and the expertise to help us scale. Government and tourism partners can help create access, reach, and opportunities within the wider tourism ecosystem. HiHome brings the cultural network, the hosts, the experiences, and the human connection." The ambition is considerable, but the condition remains unchanged: "When we bring those strengths together, we can build something much bigger without making the experience feel standardised or impersonal."

The ambitions stretch well past Saudi Arabia's borders now, toward a version of HiHome that exists everywhere and resembles itself nowhere twice - expressed in as many registers as there are homes willing to open a door. "A HiHome experience in Saudi Arabia should feel genuinely Saudi, while an experience in another country should reflect the culture and identity of that country," she says. "The model can be shared, but the experience should never feel standardised." Ask most founders to describe success and they'll sketch a trajectory upward. Ask Alsadoun, and the answer arrives unprompted, as the precise shape of failure instead. "If we ever grow to a point where we have to remove the local character, the personal connection, or the real interaction between hosts and guests just to achieve scale, then we would be moving away from what HiHome is meant to be. My goal is to build a global platform with one HiHome vision, but many different cultural expressions," she says, "allowing people around the world to discover places through the people who call them home."