About — Rihla

Why we built it

Visiting Qatar takes ten apps and a leap of faith

A visitor stitches together search results, itinerary blogs, five booking apps, a currency converter and a visa portal, mostly in English. Ask a general AI planner instead and it gets worse: it invents restaurants, guesses at prices, and never adds anything up.

Rihla answers from a curated list of real Doha venues with checked price ranges, and does the arithmetic in code rather than in the model. If it says your weekend costs 1,480 riyals, that number came from adding up real prices.

What we care about

Three commitments

Honest about money

Prices come from a curated database, totals are computed by code, and where a figure is an estimate we say so. Sponsored placements, if we ever run them, will be labelled.

Arabic as a first language

Right-to-left throughout, and an agent that answers in Arabic rather than translating an English answer. Halal and family preferences are part of planning, not a filter bolted on.

Careful with your data

Documents and receipts are encrypted at rest. Analytics are off unless you turn them on. You can export or erase everything from Settings, and guest data is deleted automatically.

Who's building it

The team

Syed Shahmir Kazmi

Founder

Product and engineering. Building Rihla end to end from Doha, from the venue database to the budget engine.

We are a small team in Doha, working towards Qatar Travel Mart 2026. If you run a hotel, a tour operator or a DMC and want your guests to have this, get in touch.

Where we are

Status, plainly

The product is built and running. You can plan a real trip on it today. Payments run against a sandbox and are clearly marked in the app, bookings hand off to partner apps rather than transacting, and we are pre-revenue. We would rather tell you that here than have you discover it mid-demo.

Try the demo Investor overview