Rihla has a story, actually. As early as 2023, some limitations in the existing travel apps led us to wonder the need for another app. The healthy competition between apps like App in The Air and Flighty also came to an unfortunate end by the former's retirement. Flighty had its own gaps, like lack of support for Android or other languages beyond English, etc.
Initially this app's idea begun formally in February as a competitor to Flighty (while respecting its impressive aspects like beautiful design and accurate flights notifications). But soon afterwards, our focus diverted to the intelligence and information side – i.e., our AI module.
Naming the Journey
Until June, we had been in a state of uncertainty. AI module was there in a basic form and that's it. App had no name, logo or even any confirmed existence. After sieving through a lot of names in English, French and Arabic, one day we found the perfect name we had been looking for.
Rihla (رحله) means travel in Arabic and while the name was spectacular (yet so simple), we faced another challenge of securing the domain name. Rihla is a single 5-letter word, so inevitably, .com was unavailable. But luck helped there, too, as we found the Rihla.cc.
Securing this domain was clearly a blessing and a sign from Allah; and the rest is history.
Acceleration Begins
We begun the app development (iPhone app) in the start of July – this is where the Acceleration came – and by the 3rd week of August, our MVP was ready.
In October, we begun our Android version too, and both are set for a January 2026 launch – exactly a year since Acceleration's inception.
Future Vision
From February 2026, it will become an autonomous product with its own team.
Features
Some of Rihla's features are:
- Multilingual Support – Inaugural version fully supports Arabic, English, French and Spanish.
- Both iPhone and Android versions
- Balanced AI – Being an Agentic AI startup, we are aware of its importance (hence it was the first module we begun with); yet, we didn't overkill it. You will find AI only where it's required.
- Privacy – Our analytics are either based on the chat module or the ticket price searches, and they are fully anonymized. All the settings, preferences and even your travel history stay on your mobile. Upcoming trips are sent to the API, but the only information we get is the flight's information (code and date).
For more details, please feel free to visit the respective page.