There is a version of this article that could run to four thousand words, because the number of luxury hotel brands that have signed something at Diriyah is genuinely extraordinary. Aman. Six Senses. Rosewood. Armani. Baccarat. Raffles. Corinthia. Orient Express. Faena. The Chedi. Four Seasons. Waldorf Astoria. Ritz-Carlton. Oberoi. Montage.
And there is the version that is useful, which is much shorter, because one of them is open.
Bab Samhan
Bab Samhan, a Luxury Collection Hotel opened in December 2024 and is the only hotel operating at Diriyah — Diriyah’s own dining listings count three of the district’s thirty venues as being inside it.
It holds 134 rooms: a hundred and six guestrooms and twenty-eight suites. It is built in the Najdi manner, in clay and tamarisk wood, around central courtyards, with the small exterior openings and low massing that the vernacular demands and with traditional doorways used as the decorative motif throughout. It is named for one of the historic gates of Diriyah.
Three places to eat: Medheef, Taleed by Michael Mina, and the Samhan Lounge. It sits on King Faisal Road in the Samhan district, about forty kilometres from King Khalid International.
The reason to stay here rather than in the city is not the room. It is that you can walk to At-Turaif and Bujairi Terrace, which means you can do the site at opening on a weekday morning when there is nobody in it, and again after dark. Everyone else is driving out from central Riyadh and arriving at eight in the evening with everyone else.
It is also the only hotel in Saudi Arabia where the building and the World Heritage site next to it were made by the same method out of the same material. That sounds like a marketing line and is instead a structural fact: clay from the same wadi, tamarisk timber, courtyards doing the work that air conditioning does elsewhere. Whatever you think of new-build heritage architecture, this is the least dishonest example of it in the country.
Source: Rawan92, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
What it is not
Bab Samhan is not a resort. There is no beach, no golf, no meaningful spa culture, and the pool is a pool rather than a destination. If your idea of a Riyadh trip is three days without leaving the property, this is the wrong hotel and Wadi Safar has not been built yet.
It is also not cheap, and it is not large enough to be flexible. A hundred and thirty-four rooms in the only operating hotel at the country’s most-promoted heritage site means it fills, particularly across the winter season and around Founding Day in February, when Diriyah is the focus of the national calendar. Book further ahead than the room count suggests you need to.
Read also: Diriyah: the guide
Wadi Safar
Six kilometres from the Diriyah district centre, and roughly eighteen to twenty from Kingdom Centre, Wadi Safar is the low-density resort and residential quarter of the same development. It has a championship golf course designed by Greg Norman and the Diriyah Equestrian and Polo Club.
Its announced hospitality partners are Aman, The Oberoi, Six Senses, The Chedi, Faena, Montage and WELL. A single construction contract worth around eight billion riyals was awarded for four of those hotels together with the equestrian and polo club, with construction stated to be commencing. No opening dates have been published for any of them.
What is announced at Diriyah itself
Seven hotels broke ground together at Diriyah — Baccarat, Corinthia, Rosewood, Armani, Raffles, Orient Express and Fauchon L’Hôtel — totalling 877 rooms between them. Armani’s is the smallest at seventy rooms, with two restaurants and a spa, and a set of fifteen Armani Residences alongside it running from twelve hundred to nineteen hundred square metres each.
Beyond those, a construction contract for the Waldorf Astoria superblock was awarded in July 2026, a joint development agreement for Four Seasons was signed in January 2026, and The Ritz-Carlton, Diriyah broke ground in December 2023. Diriyah Company’s own figure for the whole development, Wadi Safar included, is more than forty hotels and over six and a half thousand rooms.
None of these has a published opening date. Book none of them, and treat any third-party site offering reservations at any of them with suspicion.
Source: B.alotaby, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The alternative that works now
For the moment the practical answer for most visitors is to stay in central Riyadh and drive the fifteen minutes out.
Four Seasons Hotel Riyadh at Kingdom Centre holds 276 rooms and suites on floors thirty to fifty of the Kingdom Tower, which gives it the best views in the city and puts you directly above the best shopping in it. The Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh is the grand alternative, on fifty-two acres of grounds off Mekkah Road with sixty-two thousand square feet of event space — the address the government uses, which is both its strength and its character.
Both are a straightforward drive to Diriyah outside rush hour. Neither lets you be at the gates of At-Turaif at opening time, which is the one thing Bab Samhan buys you.
There is a third option that suits a particular kind of traveller: stay in the city for the working part of the trip and move to Bab Samhan for the last two nights. Riyadh’s centre is where the restaurants, the shopping and the business are; Diriyah is where you want to wake up slowly. Splitting the stay costs you one hotel change and buys you both cities.
How to choose
If Diriyah is the reason for the trip, stay at Bab Samhan. It is the only way to see the World Heritage site without a crowd, and the site is what you came for.
If Riyadh is the reason for the trip and Diriyah is an evening within it, stay in the city, book a table at Bujairi weeks ahead, and buy the site ticket separately.
And check back in a few years. When four or five of those forty hotels are actually operating, this will be one of the more interesting hotel districts in the world. It is not one yet, and pretending otherwise helps nobody standing at a check-in desk.
Featured Image Source: Ahad.F, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
