About Habibi Stay
The name
Habibi means "my dear". It is what you call someone you love, or someone you have decided to treat like family. It is said constantly across Arab and South Asian households, to guests as easily as to relatives. That is the whole idea of this product in one word: you arrive as a stranger to a city, and you are treated as someone's dear.
What we are building
Habibi Stay is a private network for finding a place to stay through the people your family already trusts.
It is not a marketplace, and it is not trying to become one. Nobody pays for a stay. Nobody lists their home. Nobody is rated. What the app actually does is hold something families used to keep in their heads. Who knows whom, who lives where, who could help. Then it makes that knowledge usable without a dozen awkward phone calls.
We are building it for the diaspora first, because that is where the need is sharpest: families spread across more countries than any one person can keep track of, elders who want to host and have no safe way to offer, and young people arriving in cities where they have relatives they have never met.
How this started
Growing up, if someone was traveling, studying abroad, or stuck somewhere, there was always someone to call. That system wasn't written down anywhere. It lived in our elders' heads.
Years later, when my 15-year-old son was stranded overnight in Vancouver, I did what I'd always done. I called my mom. She made one call. Suddenly, a cousin I hadn't seen in decades was welcoming my son into her home.
Same thing happened in reverse. A cousin's son was moving to DC for school from Pakistan, coming to the US for the first time. I hosted him, helped him settle. It wasn't a task. It was joy, it was family.
Then I noticed my own kids don't have this invisible map. They don't know who lives where, or who might be glad to host them. This knowledge is quietly fading with the next generation, who aren't growing up in close proximity to the dense family networks my generation took for granted.
Habibi Stay began there. Not to invent a new behavior, but to preserve something we are already doing. To carry forward a culture of hospitality without turning it into a transaction. Technology has been very good at connecting strangers. This is an attempt to build something that helps us reconnect with people who were never really strangers at all.
The company
Habibi Stay is created by Mangla & Co LLC, a Virginia limited liability company. We also make Mohallah.
Where we are
Habibi Stay is open to anyone. There is no invitation, no application, and nobody to approve you: you verify a phone number and you are in. The iPhone app is out now, and Android will follow.
If you are waiting on Android, leave your details and we will tell you when it arrives.
Get in touch
For questions, community partnerships, or press, use our contact form or write to hello@habibistay.app.