AlUla has eight hotels open and three real decisions. Two of them sit in the same valley, a few minutes apart, and are routinely confused with each other because both are described as tented. The third is not in the valley at all — it is inside the World Heritage site, in a railway station the Ottomans finished in 1907, and it is the strangest hotel in Saudi Arabia.
Source: AW²
Banyan Tree AlUla — the spa one
It opened in October 2022, in partnership with Accor, and was designed by the French practice AW², appointed by the Royal Commission for AlUla with the French Agency for AlUla Development. The villas are tented, in one-, two- and three-bedroom configurations, spread along the floor of the Ashar Valley about fifteen kilometres from Hegra.
AW²’s description of the approach is the useful part: architecture treated as landscape, each suite composed of a simple platform and a solid structure evoking the neighbouring rocks, sand-coloured canvas for ventilation and shade, terracotta renders chosen to match the surroundings, and spa facades made of compacted sand in horizontal coloured layers that echo the rock strata behind them. That last detail is the one worth going to look at.
Dining is Saffron, Banyan Tree’s signature Thai restaurant, and Harrat for Middle Eastern. The spa is the reason to choose it — treatments in secluded caves, sound baths under the stars, an infinity rock pool — and if a spa programme is what makes a desert trip work for you, this is the unambiguous answer.
Source: Our Habitas AlUla
Our Habitas AlUla — the sociable one
Ninety-six villas in the same valley, in six categories, and a completely different proposition. Habitas builds around programming and communal life rather than seclusion: a restaurant, Tama, working from local farms; a lounge on a deck; Thuraya Wellness combining modern technique with ancestral practice; yoga, meditation, cultural activity, and a steady flow of things happening.
The villa categories tell you who it is for. There is a Celestial Villa with a telescope. There is an Art Villa positioned for views of one of the Desert X installations — an actual land-art commission, not a sculpture in a lobby. There are Alcove, Canyon, Wellness and Arabian villas, the last being the largest and most secluded.
It is the youngest-feeling hotel in AlUla and the one most likely to introduce you to other guests, which is either the point or the problem depending entirely on you.
Source: GHM Hotels
The Chedi Hegra — the one that should not exist
Thirty-five rooms, suites and villas inside the inscribed boundary of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That sentence is enough on its own; almost nowhere permits it.
The hotel occupies the Hegra railway station, built in 1907 under the German engineer Heinrich Meissner as part of the Hijaz line running from Damascus to Medina, and the structures around it. It opened on 4 December 2024. The architecture is by Gio Forma, the Milan studio behind Maraya, and the method was restoration rather than insertion: original stone walls kept and built from, rooms made out of buildings that were already standing.
In the middle of it sits Locomotive 964, a 2-6-0 built by Arnold Jung Lokomotivfabrik in 1906, which ran the Hajj route until the 1920s and was restored over a year and more than fifteen thousand hours of work. A seven-hundred-metre canopy called Lamellae runs the length of the old track. Nothing about that locomotive helps the hotel function. Somebody simply decided a hundred-and-twenty-year-old machine should be beautiful again.
Dining runs to Prima Classe for Mediterranean, the Golden Hour Lounge for sunset, Al Mahattah for casual, and a Saudi coffee house. But you are not booking it for dinner. You are booking it because you can walk out of your room into Hegra.
Source: Dar Tantora The House Hotel
The fourth option, which is not in the valley either
Dar Tantora belongs in this decision even though it belongs to a different category. Thirty restored mudbrick houses inside AlUla Old Town, lit by seventeen hundred candles, with electricity only in the bathrooms — it is the one stay in AlUla that puts you in a settlement rather than a resort, and the one most likely to be the memory you keep.
It is also the least comfortable in the conventional sense, and people who need a gym at seven in the morning should book elsewhere and visit for dinner instead.
Where you actually eat
Banyan Tree runs Saffron, the group’s signature Thai kitchen, and Harrat for Middle Eastern. Habitas runs Tama, which works from local farms, plus a deck lounge and food trucks down at Caravan. The Chedi has the widest spread: Prima Classe for Mediterranean, Al Mahattah for casual international, a Saudi coffee house, and the Golden Hour Lounge, which is a sunset bar with a two-thousand-year-old necropolis in the middle distance.
None of the three is a dining destination in the way a city hotel is, and none needs to be — you are eating where you sleep because the valley has nothing else at night. Judge them on breakfast and on the bar, which is where you will actually spend the hours.
What all three get right
None of them is tall. That sounds like faint praise and it is the reason the valley still works: in a landscape where the cliffs do the vertical, every operator here has stayed low and let them. The Royal Commission’s design control is visible in it, and the counterfactual — four-storey blocks on the valley floor, which almost any other jurisdiction would have permitted — would have destroyed the thing everybody came for.
Two things that separate them
The first is company. Habitas is built for encounter — communal tables, programming, a bar people linger at. Banyan Tree and The Chedi are built for privacy, and at The Chedi the thirty-five keys spread across a railway compound mean you can go most of a day without seeing another guest. Choose on temperament, not on rate.
The second is what you wake up to. In Ashar the cliffs are directly overhead, close and enclosing, and the light arrives late because the valley walls hold it off. At Hegra the country opens out, the formations stand apart from each other across a plain, and the sun is on the tombs early. Same region, two completely different mornings.
Read also: AlUla: the guide
Which one
If the archaeology is the trip, The Chedi Hegra, and it is not close — proximity to a World Heritage site at that scale is not something the other two can manufacture. If you want the valley, silence and a serious spa, Banyan Tree. If you want the valley with people in it, and a programme rather than a retreat, Habitas.
The one thing all three share is Ashar and Hegra being twenty minutes apart, which means the choice is about how you want your evenings to feel, not about what you will get to see. Nobody in AlUla is far from anything.
Featured Image Source: Our Habitas AlUla
