Haifaa Mall, Jeddah: A Practical Guide to a Neighbourhood Shopping Centre on Palestine Street

Uncertainty flagged at the top, as it should be for any pilgrim or traveller deciding whether to spend an afternoon here: Haifaa Mall is real, it is in Jeddah’s Al-Ruwais district, and the weight of evidence says it is open and trading through 2025 and into 2026. But it is not a well-documented property. Its own operator’s corporate website confirms it exists and lists live tenants, but supplies almost none of the basic facts — no stated opening date, no floor count, no gross leasable area, no store count. Everything on those points comes from secondary sources that disagree with each other, sometimes significantly. This guide reports every conflict it found rather than picking a number and presenting it as settled fact. If you are choosing between Haifaa Mall and Jeddah’s larger malls — Red Sea Mall or Mall of Arabia, covered in this series’ articles 95 and 96 — that thinner documentary record is itself useful information: Haifaa Mall is a smaller, more local property, and the comparative silence around it in trade press and official reporting reflects that scale.

Overview

Haifaa Mall sits at the intersection of Madinah Road and Palestine Street (Falastin Street) in Jeddah’s Al-Ruwais district, a historic quarter close to the city centre and not far from the Corniche. It is owned and operated by Cenomi Centers, the Saudi retail landlord formerly known as Arabian Centres Company, which rebranded in 2022 alongside its sister fashion-retail arm as part of the wider Cenomi Group restructuring. The mall’s own listing on Cenomi’s website is live and current, and its store directory page returns real, presumably current tenants — a useful sign of ongoing operation even though the page does not state basic facts like opening hours or floor plan.

Confirmation that the mall is trading also comes from outside its own marketing: it appears in Cenomi’s disclosed portfolio list reported by MarketScreener in August 2025, and — more tellingly for a shopping centre — it turns up as a live asset in ANB Capital’s equity research on Cenomi Centers, which prices the mall’s lease as running through 2032 and treats it as a stable, if minor, contributor to group rental income. A financial analyst modelling a REIT-style landlord’s cash flows does not include a defunct property in a lease-expiry table. On TripAdvisor, the mall carries a 3.9-out-of-5 rating from 76 reviews and sits around #16–17 of roughly 105–110 things to do in Jeddah — a middling but active listing, with reviews stretching from 2012 through the early 2020s and the page itself refreshed for 2025–2026 browsing. Muvi Cinemas’ own Arabic-language page for its Haifa Mall branch, last touched in February 2026 according to the page’s metadata, describes the cinema as operating now, in the present tense.

None of this is the kind of unambiguous, dated confirmation this series prefers — a press release, a government filing, a recent dated news article specifically about Haifaa Mall. But the convergence of an active corporate storefront, an equity analyst’s lease-expiry model, and a maintained review and booking ecosystem is about as much certainty as a mid-tier neighbourhood mall generates, and it clears the bar this guide requires: a pilgrim or visitor with a free afternoon will not be walking up to a shuttered building.

What Haifaa Mall actually is, in one paragraph: a single-storey, mid-sized retail centre built around an upscale supermarket, roughly one hundred to one hundred fifty shops depending which count you believe, a nine-screen Muvi Cinemas multiplex, and a cluster of indoor children’s entertainment venues — Billy Beez, Funky Monkey, and others. It is not a flagship destination mall on the scale of Red Sea Mall or Mall of Arabia, and reviewers consistently describe it that way: “middle of the road,” “just OK,” “an average mall.” It suits residents of the surrounding Al-Ruwais, Al-Hamra, and Al-Andalus neighbourhoods running errands, families with young children looking for an air-conditioned play afternoon, and travellers staying nearby who want groceries, a meal, or a film without crossing the city. It does not suit visitors expecting a comprehensive department-store-anchored shopping trip, luxury retail, or a marquee entertainment attraction; for that, the larger malls covered elsewhere in this series are the more honest recommendation.

The District and Its History

Al-Ruwais (also transliterated Ar-Ru’ays or Rowais) is one of the oldest inhabited districts outside Jeddah’s walled historic core, Al-Balad — a point this series’ article 84 covers in full, and this guide will not repeat that ground. What matters here is Al-Ruwais’s own separate, non-heritage-listed history, because it explains why a modern shopping mall sits where it does.

According to Arab News reporting from November 2009, Al-Ruwais dates back roughly 150 years and was traditionally known as Jeddah’s “sailors’ district,” settled by fishermen and mariners along what was then open coastline before land reclamation pushed the shore further out. The same Arab News piece notes the district is bordered by Al-Andalus Street to the west, Palestine Street (Falasteen) to the north, Madinah Road to the east, and King Abdullah Road to the south — which places Haifaa Mall, at the Madinah Road/Palestine Street intersection, right at the district’s northeastern corner. An Arabic-language feature in Okaz newspaper from December 2013 puts the district’s history at roughly 200 years and describes it as bounded by Al-Hamra to the north, Al-Baghdadiyah Al-Gharbiyah to the south, Al-Sharafeyah to the east, and the sea Corniche to the west — a slightly different set of boundaries than Arab News gives, which is itself a small illustration of how loosely Jeddah’s older, informally grown districts are defined in different sources. Long-time residents interviewed by Okaz describe Al-Ruwais as historically a close-knit community of fishing families from the Harb tribe and related clans, centred on a traditional neighbourhood gathering space (a “markaz”) where elders still meet, and note that the district contains Jeddah’s oldest and best-known cemetery, Maqbarat Al-Ruwais, in its southern section.

The district also has a harder, more recent history that a fair guide should not omit. Al-Ruwais is where the December 2004 attack on the US Consulate in Jeddah took place, a fact Arab News’s own 2009 profile of the district opens with, before pivoting to the area’s older identity and its redevelopment prospects. By the mid-2000s the district had also become known, per that same reporting, for ageing 1960s-era villas and a population skewing toward lower-income non-Saudi residents — Arab News’s 2009 figures describe more than half of surveyed residents as non-Saudi, working in modest-income jobs, many long-settled in the area. An academic study of the district published via the European Scientific Journal, citing a 2011 Arab News population estimate, puts Al-Ruwais’s population at around 34,000, with roughly a third Saudi nationals, and describes the district’s footprint at about 346 acres.

In June 2009, Jeddah’s mayor at the time, Adel Fakieh, signed off on a formal redevelopment plan for Al-Ruwais, reported by Arab News, intended to replace the district’s older housing stock with a modern high-rise residential and commercial quarter, covering roughly 1.8 million square metres and following an earlier redevelopment precedent set in Jeddah’s Khozam district. That 2009 plan, and the broader “modern high-rise district” ambitions described in the fuller November 2009 Arab News feature, is the urban-renewal context Haifaa Mall’s 2011 opening (a date this guide flags below as itself imperfectly sourced) sits inside — a mall built at the edge of an old fishing quarter just as that quarter was being reimagined as a denser, more commercial part of central Jeddah. Whether the wider Al-Ruwais master-plan redevelopment described in 2009 was ever carried out at the scale proposed is outside what this guide can verify; no 2020s-era source consulted here confirms or updates that project’s status, and this guide will not claim it did or didn’t happen. What is verifiable is that Haifaa Mall opened into, and still sits within, a genuinely old part of Jeddah — just not one with religious or pilgrimage significance. This is the honest limit of what “history” means for this venue: real neighbourhood history, no manufactured sacred connection.

Origins and Development of the Venue

This is the section where the documentary trail thins out most sharply, and it should be said plainly: no primary source consulted for this guide — not Cenomi’s own mall page, not a press release, not a dated news report from the mall’s opening period — independently confirms Haifaa Mall’s founding date, architect, or original developer. What exists instead is a consistent but secondary claim, repeated across several Arabic-language retail and lifestyle blogs, that the mall opened in 2011. This figure appears in Saudipeek’s mall guide, dated April 2025, which states the mall was marking its thirteenth anniversary that year (consistent with a 2011 opening), and separately in an RLI Connect mall-demographics summary compiled for retail-leasing purposes in 2023, which also lists a 2011 launch year. Two independent-looking sources agreeing on the same year is reassuring, but neither is a primary source in the strict sense — both are third-party compilations, and it is possible one drew on the other, or both drew on a shared earlier listing. This guide treats 2011 as the best-supported figure available, while being explicit that it has not been independently verified against an official announcement.

The mall has always been operated by the company now known as Cenomi Centers. Older listings, including a MAPS.ME entry and Saudipeek’s own text, refer to the operator by its earlier name, Arabian Centres Company (شركة المراكز العربية) — one of Saudi Arabia’s largest mall developers, historically tied to the Fawaz Alhokair Group. Cenomi’s own 2022 annual report documents the 2022 rebrand: Arabian Centres became Cenomi Centers, and Alhokair Fashion Retail Co. became Cenomi Retail, both brought under a unified Cenomi identity. Haifaa Mall’s ownership did not change hands in that process — it is the same company under a new name, a distinction worth making because Saudi retail branding has shifted enough in the last decade that “who owns this mall” questions genuinely confuse online listings, some of which (like MAPS.ME, evidently uncrawled since the rebrand) still point to the old arabiancentres.com domain.

No expansion, renovation, or closure event for Haifaa Mall turned up in any source consulted for this guide. That absence is itself a data point, if a soft one: this is not a mall with a documented history of redevelopment phases, the way Red Sea Mall’s 2025 leasing push (covered in article 95) or Mall of Arabia’s post-2022 rebrand are documented. Haifaa Mall appears to have opened once, in a form close to its current one, and to have continued operating quietly since — with the notable exception of its cinema, addressed below.

Architecture and Design

Here again the record is thin, and this guide will not invent detail to fill it. What can be said, drawn from consistent visitor description rather than an architect’s statement, is that Haifaa Mall is a single-storey retail building — a design choice that sets it apart from almost every other major Jeddah mall, which are typically built across two, three, or more levels. A Bayut.sa property blog, published July 2024, describes the mall as consisting of a single floor with a moderate footprint compared to other Jeddah malls, but notes wide corridors and large storefronts as a compensating design feature. A Wingie travel blog from September 2025 repeats the single-floor description and adds that the building has a “classic, simple” exterior that gives little hint of a more modern interior design with careful lighting. Dozens of TripAdvisor reviewers independently confirm the single-level layout across a decade of visits — “Good simple single floor mall,” one reviewer wrote in 2021; “no upper floors, so food court in ground floor and easy access,” wrote another around the same time; “Good Ole Fashioned ONE LEVEL Mall………….A rare breed these days!!” wrote a reviewer in January 2018, on the same TripAdvisor review page.

This is where a genuine conflict needs flagging rather than quietly resolving. A commercial-leasing summary compiled by RLI Connect in 2023, evidently built from Cenomi’s own portfolio data for retail-leasing purposes, lists Haifaa Mall’s floor count as “5.” That number is completely at odds with every visitor account and every other secondary source describing the property, all of which agree the retail floor plan is a single level. The most plausible explanations are either a data-entry or template error in the RLI Connect document (this kind of leasing summary is often built from a spreadsheet template shared across many properties, and stray figures do slip through) or that the “5” refers to something else in the mall’s structure not disambiguated in the extract — parking levels, for instance, though the same document separately states 3,556 parking spaces without describing them as multi-level. This guide sides with the overwhelming visitor and blog consensus: Haifaa Mall is a single-storey retail centre. But the conflicting figure exists in a document produced for professional retail-leasing purposes, and a careful guide reports that rather than silently discarding it.

On size, three different figures appear across the sources gathered for this article, and none of them can be confidently called definitive:

  • 32,946 square metres of leasable area, per Saudipeek (April 2025), alongside an 85.6% occupancy rate that the same source explicitly attributes to 2018 data — itself now a stale figure being repeated in a 2025-dated article, worth flagging as a caution about how often these mall guides recycle old statistics without updating them.
  • 34,000 square metres of gross leasable area, with a stated built-up area of 50,000 square metres, 142 retail units, and 3,556 parking spaces, per the RLI Connect leasing summary (2023).
  • 33,757 square metres of GLA, described as 2.7% of Cenomi Centers’ total portfolio GLA and contributing 1.2% of group rental revenue, per ANB Capital’s 2025 equity research on Cenomi Centers, which additionally classifies the mall as a “Category C” asset — the lowest of the tiers the report uses to rank Cenomi’s malls — and models the mall’s ground lease as running through 2032.

These three figures are close enough (roughly 32,900–34,000 square metres) that they likely represent honest measurement or rounding differences on the same underlying property rather than confusion about which mall is being described, and the ANB Capital and RLI Connect numbers in particular — both drawn from real-estate/financial-analysis contexts rather than tourism blogging — corroborate each other closely. The consistent theme across all three, and worth stating plainly for anyone comparing this mall to its larger siblings: Haifaa Mall is a modest-sized neighbourhood centre, smaller than Red Sea Mall or Mall of Arabia, and the ANB Capital report’s independent “Category C” grading — the analyst’s own shorthand for a lower-tier, lower-revenue-contributing asset within Cenomi’s portfolio — is a useful, unbiased confirmation of that scale from a source with no interest in flattering or denigrating the property.

What You Will Actually Find There

Store counts vary by source in the same way the size figures do. Saudipeek and Bayut.sa both describe “more than 150” stores; Wingie gives “more than 100”; the RLI Connect leasing document lists 142 individual retail units. None of these is unreasonable for a mall of this footprint, and the differences likely reflect whether small kiosks, mobile-phone counters, and sub-brand counters inside larger department stores are being counted separately. Cenomi’s own live store directory, fetched directly for this guide, returned a partial list of roughly three dozen named tenants rather than a complete roster — evidently a filtered or paginated view rather than the full directory — so this guide cannot independently confirm any of the three totals above, and says so rather than picking the most flattering one.

Hypermarket and groceries. The mall’s anchor grocery tenant is Manuel Market, an upscale supermarket that multiple TripAdvisor reviewers single out as one of the mall’s best features — “an excellent upscale Supermarket,” one 2021 review calls it. Recent Google-style reviews aggregated by Top Rated Online in mid-2025 are more mixed: several praise the range and cleanliness, but a recurring complaint is staff customer service, unclear or inconsistent shelf pricing, and prices some shoppers consider high relative to other Jeddah supermarkets, with one reviewer noting “the variety is lacking, and the aisles are quite narrow.” Take both sets of impressions as genuine and roughly contemporaneous rather than resolving them into a single verdict — supermarket experiences vary by visit and by shopper expectation more than most retail categories.

Department and multi-category stores. Centerpoint operates inside the mall as a multi-brand department store housing sub-concepts including Splash (casual fashion), Shoemart (shoes and bags), Baby Shop (children’s and infant goods), and Lifestyle (cosmetics, personal care, home décor). Deraah, a Saudi multi-category retailer, also appears in Cenomi’s live tenant list.

Fashion. The fashion offer is broad but mid-market rather than luxury: menswear names cited include Janet/Jenyns, Blue Age, and US Polo Assn; womenswear includes Bermuda, Women’Secret, and Dynamite; general fashion brands confirmed via Cenomi’s own current listing include Giordano, R&B, Beverly Hills Polo Club, Aldo, and Call It Spring. This sits at a noticeably lower price and prestige tier than the international luxury and premium-fashion anchors found in Red Sea Mall or Mall of Arabia, and no source consulted here names a true luxury fashion house as a Haifaa Mall tenant.

Abaya and modest fashion. One dedicated abaya retailer is named across the sources gathered — Wahat Al Jalabia — identified by Saudipeek as a women’s fashion outlet in the mall. Beyond this single named store, the record does not support any further specific claims about the scale or variety of abaya retail at Haifaa Mall; a shopper looking specifically for a wide abaya selection should not treat this mall as a specialist destination on the strength of the available evidence.

Gold and jewellery. This is a genuine gap in the record. Several watch and accessory retailers are documented — Elite Watches, Swiss Corner Watches, Al Homaidhi Watches, Hamsat Accessories, and Parfois — but no source consulted names a dedicated gold souq-style jeweller inside Haifaa Mall, in the way Jeddah’s traditional gold markets or larger malls typically feature. This guide will not claim gold retail exists here beyond watches and costume accessories; readers specifically seeking gold jewellery should look to Jeddah’s dedicated gold markets rather than assume this mall covers that category.

Electronics. No electronics retailer is named in any source consulted for this article — not Cenomi’s own partial store list, not the Arabic-language mall guides, not the TripAdvisor reviews. This is a further honest gap, and by contrast with Mall of Arabia and Red Sea Mall (both of which have documented electronics anchors), Haifaa Mall does not appear, on the available evidence, to be a strong destination for electronics shopping.

Pharmacy. Whites Pharmacy appears in Cenomi’s current, live store directory for the mall — confirmed retail health provision, even if the wider retail-health offer is not otherwise documented in depth.

Perfume and cosmetics. This is one of the mall’s best-documented categories. Named tenants include Sephora, Yves Rocher, and The Body Shop for cosmetics, plus a strong cluster of Arabic perfume houses: Anfasak Dukhoon, Al-Rasasi, AbdulSamad Al Qurashi, Ibrahim Al Qurashi (a branch specifically located, per Saudipeek, near Gate 4), and Reef Perfumes. This is a category where Haifaa Mall’s offer looks genuinely comparable in variety, if not necessarily scale, to larger Jeddah malls.

Food court and named restaurants. Multiple TripAdvisor reviewers describe the food court as “nice and small,” located near one of the mall’s entrance gates for easy access without a full mall walkthrough. Named restaurants across the sources gathered include Double Cafe (Middle Eastern cuisine, described by one source as operating 24 hours), Kudu (fast food, burgers and sandwiches), Roma Way (Italian, pizza and pasta), Al Saj Al Rifi (Lebanese, manakish and pastries), and Sayadia Express (seafood). Two TripAdvisor reviewers separately mention eating at “Raffaello” and a restaurant they call “Five Asian Kitchens” during a visit where they note the mall was otherwise closed for what appears to have been an art exhibition inside the space — an unusual detail suggesting the mall has, at least once, hosted a temporary gallery or exhibition event, though this guide found no further corroborating source for that specific occurrence and flags it as a single, unverified reviewer anecdote rather than an established fact.

Cafes. The cafe list, again mostly from Saudipeek’s April 2025 guide, is long: Larica Cafe, Me Too Cafe, Al Mirkaz Cafe (specialising in Arabic coffee, dates, and traditional sweets, located near Gate 6), Cinnabon, Baskin Robbins, Holom Lounge, Molten Chocolate (Belgian chocolate desserts, crepes, waffles), Gelato Divino (Italian-style gelato), MamaBunz Cafe (fresh baked goods), Deif Kaif (Arabic coffee and Moroccan tea), and West Coast Cafe (health-oriented baked goods, juices).

Cinema. Muvi Cinemas operates the mall’s multiplex, located on the ground floor near Gate 1. Saudipeek’s April 2025 guide states the cinema opened in 2019, describing it as part of the Kingdom’s post-2018 cinema-reopening wave under Vision 2030’s entertainment-sector expansion — plausible given Saudi Arabia’s well-documented 2018 lifting of the decades-long cinema ban, though this specific 2019 opening date for the Haifaa Mall branch is not independently confirmed by Muvi Cinemas’ own site, whose page for this location, when fetched directly for this guide, stated no dates or screen counts at all. The Arabic version of Muvi’s own page, last touched February 2026, does confirm the branch has 9 screening halls with a combined capacity of 910 seats, plus a dedicated food-and-beverage area. Saudipeek separately describes premium formats including Dolby Atmos sound, 4DX and 4DX Ultra motion-effect screens, and VIP suites with in-seat food delivery — features consistent with Muvi’s standard premium offering chainwide, though again not independently verified specifically for this branch beyond Saudipeek’s description. Ticket pricing is another area of conflict worth flagging plainly: Saudipeek (April 2025) cites SAR 55 for standard 2D tickets and SAR 60 for 3D; a Bayut.sa blog from July 2024 instead gives a range of SAR 34–45; Wingie’s September 2025 guide gives a broader SAR 45–60 range including premium formats. Given how frequently Saudi cinema pricing shifts with promotions, seat category, and day of the week, treat all of these as approximate and confirm current pricing directly with Muvi Cinemas before planning a visit.

Family and children’s entertainment. This is the mall’s most substantial documented strength outside retail. Billy Beez, an indoor adventure playground brand, operates a branch near Gate 5 with a rainbow wave slide, a “Ballistics Arena” foam-dart play area, indoor sports courts, a toddler-specific “Mini Beez” zone for ages one to two, a themed “Honeycomb Village,” and trampolines, alongside birthday party bookings; full-day child tickets are quoted around SAR 70 (discounted from a SAR 90 list price) for ages three to twelve, and SAR 45 for toddlers, with accompanying adults charged a nominal SAR 19. Funky Monkey, located on an upper mezzanine area near an open play zone, offers a skating rink, a ball pit, and party-hosting services, at roughly SAR 55–77 per ticket depending on promotion. Red Sea Beach, a smaller play centre near Gate 5, adds a ball pit and cycling track for SAR 75–88. Ghayma operates as a day nursery and childcare service rather than a play attraction. Challenge Round, in a lower-level area near Gate 1, is a broader family entertainment centre with bowling (SAR 25 per game), billiards (SAR 30/hour), a small VR games offering (SAR 15 per experience), console gaming stations, table hockey, and table tennis. A separate, smaller standalone VR arcade near Gate 1 offers dinosaur-themed and futuristic VR adventures. All of these figures are drawn from Saudipeek’s April 2025 guide and should be treated as indicative rather than current — none were independently corroborated by an operator’s own pricing page.

Highlights Worth Your Time

Based on the pattern across dozens of reviews spanning more than a decade, the parts of Haifaa Mall that consistently earn praise are narrow and specific rather than broad. The children’s entertainment cluster — Billy Beez in particular, cited repeatedly and positively — is the strongest documented draw for families with young children, and the single-floor layout genuinely does make navigating with a stroller or small children easier than a multi-level mall requiring escalators. Manuel Market draws consistent praise as an above-average supermarket experience, useful for a pilgrim or visitor stocking up on packaged food, toiletries, or gifts without needing a full department-store shopping trip. The perfume and cosmetics cluster, with genuine Saudi heritage brands like AbdulSamad Al Qurashi and Ibrahim Al Qurashi alongside Sephora, is a reasonable stop for gift shopping. And several reviewers specifically value the mall’s quiet, uncrowded atmosphere compared to Jeddah’s larger, busier malls — one 2016 TripAdvisor review calls it a “ladies’ mall,” suggesting a comfortable, low-hassle environment for women shopping alone or with family, though this is one reviewer’s characterisation rather than an established or marketed positioning.

What is skippable, again based on the weight of visitor testimony rather than this guide’s own judgment: expecting a comprehensive, department-store-scale shopping experience will disappoint. Multiple reviewers note incomplete size ranges in clothing and shoe stores, a small food court by Jeddah-mall standards, and — in at least one documented and fairly detailed 2015-dated review — poor air conditioning and several long-term shuttered storefronts on that particular visit, alongside a comment that the range of goods felt “incomplete” and the atmosphere “dull.” That review is nearly a decade old and should not be taken as necessarily reflecting current conditions, but a 2019-dated Arabic-language TripAdvisor review makes a similar complaint about shops that had “closed their doors,” suggesting some tenant turnover and vacancy has been an ongoing, if not constant, feature of the mall’s recent history rather than a one-off. If you are choosing between Haifaa Mall and Red Sea Mall or Mall of Arabia purely for range and reliability of stock, the larger malls are the safer bet.

Practical Visitor Guide

Location. Haifaa Mall is at the intersection of Madinah Road (Tareeq Al-Madinah Al-Munawwarah) and Palestine Street (Falastin Street) in the Al-Ruwais district of central Jeddah, opposite the Garden City Compound according to one Arabic-language guide, Arbdar’s Jeddah shopping directory. The postal address given by the Middle East Council of Shopping Centres and Retailers directory is Palestine Street, Al-Ruwais, Jeddah 23215, Saudi Arabia. This places the mall roughly midway between Al-Balad, Jeddah’s historic old town (covered in this series’ article 84), and the Corniche waterfront (article 103) — a genuinely central, if not particularly scenic, part of the city, and considerably closer to the city centre than either Red Sea Mall (Ash Shati district, article 95) or Mall of Arabia (An Nuzhah district near the airport, article 96).

Getting there and fares (checked 25 July 2026). No source consulted names a specific SAPTCO city bus route stopping directly at Haifaa Mall. SAPTCO’s Jeddah city bus network, described in its own May 2025 route brochure, runs 14 principal routes served by 91 modern buses, operating roughly 5:30am to 11:30pm across the week, with over 370 stops citywide, and Gulf News reported in February 2023 that SAPTCO’s electric bus route along Madinah Road connects Khalidiyah and Al-Balad while serving residents of Khalidiyah, Rawdah, Al-Andalus, Al-Ruwais, and Al-Baghdadiyah — a route corridor that, on the map, passes close to the mall’s Madinah Road frontage, though this guide could not confirm a named stop directly outside the mall. A taxi or ride-hailing app is the realistic way most visitors will arrive. On typical Jeddah in-city pricing, a Reddit thread from October 2025 discussing everyday Careem fares describes short in-city trips of around 6 kilometres running SAR 11–15, and longer 20-kilometre trips running SAR 30–40, without surge pricing outside peak hours — figures a rider travelling from central Jeddah, Al-Balad, or the Corniche to Al-Ruwais should find broadly representative, though actual fares depend on real-time demand and traffic and should always be checked in-app before booking. From King Abdulaziz International Airport, expect a considerably higher fare given the distance north to south across the city; general Jeddah airport transfer estimates compiled by House of Saud in April 2026 put an airport-to-Corniche or Al-Balad ride at roughly SAR 40–70 via ride-hailing apps, and a similar range is echoed by FadiTaxi’s airport fare guide. As with all Saudi ride-hailing fares, these figures move with fuel prices, demand, and time of day, and should be treated as a rough planning benchmark rather than a quote.

Parking. Multiple TripAdvisor reviewers, across several years, praise the mall’s parking as ample and conveniently distributed, with “many doors and parking space all around the mall,” in the words of one 2021 review — a genuine advantage of the single-floor layout, since visitors can park near whichever of the mall’s several numbered gates is closest to their destination shop rather than navigating a multi-level parking structure. The RLI Connect leasing document’s figure of 3,556 parking spaces, while unverified independently, is broadly consistent with a mall of this size having generous surface or structured parking.

Opening hours (checked 25 July 2026) — another area with real conflicts. TripAdvisor’s own hours listing for the mall, appearing consistently across the platform’s various language versions when fetched for this guide, still shows a split daily schedule: 9:30am–1:00pm and then 5:00pm–1:00am on Saturday through Thursday, with Friday running 5:00pm–1:00am only. This split-shift pattern — closing at midday and reopening in late afternoon — was the historic norm for Saudi retail for decades, tied to prayer-time closures and the traditional working day, but Saudi Arabia has substantially reformed retail-hours regulation in recent years, moving many businesses toward continuous opening. More recent sources describe continuous hours: the Middle East Yellow Pages listing, dated March 2025, gives 9:30am–11:00pm Saturday through Thursday and 2:00pm–11:30pm on Friday, with no midday closure; a Saudi Gates guide from July 2024 gives the same pattern, and adds that the Manuel supermarket runs longer hours, roughly 7:00am to 2:00am daily, while entertainment venues run from 10:00am to as late as 2:00am on weekdays and from 2:00pm on Fridays. A Wingie guide from September 2025 similarly describes continuous 9:30am–11:00pm hours. On balance, the continuous-hours pattern from these three more recent, independent guides looks more likely to reflect current practice, and TripAdvisor’s split-shift listing looks like it may simply not have been updated to reflect Saudi Arabia’s broader retail-hours liberalisation. But this guide cannot be certain which pattern is currently correct, and given that even the “current” sources disagree slightly on exact closing times (11:00pm versus 11:30pm on different days across different sources), any visitor should treat these hours as approximate and confirm directly — by phone, at +966 9 2000 0262, the number given consistently across multiple listings including Saudi Gates and Middle East Yellow Pages — or via Cenomi’s own app before travelling, particularly if arriving in the early afternoon when a legacy midday closure, if it still exists in any form, would matter most.

Ramadan and Eid hours. No source consulted for this guide gives Haifaa-Mall-specific Ramadan or Eid opening hours. Time Out Jeddah’s roundup of Jeddah mall Ramadan hours, which covers Al Andalus Mall, Al Salaam Mall, Atelier La Vie, Aziz Mall, Jeddah Boulevard, Mall of Arabia, Red Sea Mall, Roshan Mall, Serafi Mega Mall, and Stars Avenue Mall in detail, does not include Haifaa Mall at all — an explicit gap this guide will not paper over. For general context only, and not as a substitute for Haifaa-Mall-specific information: the malls Time Out does cover typically shift to a pattern of stores opening around midday, closing in the late afternoon before iftar, then reopening in the evening and running past midnight into the small hours — Mall of Arabia’s Ramadan hours in that roundup, for instance, run stores 11:30am–5:30pm and then 9:00pm–3:00am on non-Friday days, with an additional early-morning 5:00am–11:00am opening during the final ten days of Ramadan for suhoor and Eid shopping. If Haifaa Mall follows a broadly similar pattern to its Cenomi sister malls Aziz Mall and Mall of Arabia — a reasonable but unconfirmed assumption, since all three share the same operator — visitors during Ramadan should expect a comparable split-shift, late-night pattern, and should confirm directly with the mall before planning a Ramadan-season visit.

Prayer Facilities and Religious Considerations

Saudipeek’s April 2025 mall guide, in its description of the Muvi Cinemas branch’s facilities, mentions the presence of prayer areas (أماكن للصلاة) and ablution facilities (أماكن للوضوء) among the cinema’s amenities — a small but useful data point suggesting at least the cinema wing has dedicated prayer space, consistent with standard practice at Saudi retail and entertainment venues generally. No source consulted gives a specific location, size, or capacity for a musalla serving the wider mall, and this guide will not invent detail on that point. As a matter of general Saudi retail practice — not a site-specific claim — malls across the Kingdom, including this one’s larger Jeddah counterparts covered elsewhere in this series, typically provide separate small prayer rooms for men and women near main entrances or central corridors, and it would be consistent with standard practice for Haifaa Mall to do the same, though this guide could not verify it directly for this property.

On the question of prayer-time closures: the split-shift retail hours historically observed across Saudi Arabia, described above and still shown on some listings for this mall, were tied to the tradition of businesses closing around prayer times, particularly Dhuhr (midday) prayer. Saudi Arabia’s retail-hours reforms in recent years have moved many businesses, including malls, away from this pattern toward continuous opening with brief, informal pauses rather than full closures at each of the five daily prayers — but this guide found no source specifically confirming Haifaa Mall’s current practice on this point, and a visitor arriving around prayer times, especially Dhuhr and Asr, should be prepared for the possibility of a short operational pause at individual shop counters even if the mall itself remains open.

Halal food can be assumed as a baseline across all of the mall’s named restaurants and cafes, consistent with standard Saudi commercial practice and requiring no special verification; no source suggested otherwise for any tenant listed here. Modest dress norms apply as they do throughout Jeddah’s public retail spaces — loose, non-revealing clothing for both men and women is the practical and socially expected norm, and women are not required to wear an abaya in shopping malls under current Saudi practice, though many choose to for comfort and social ease, and the mall’s own abaya retailer, Wahat Al Jalabia, is there for anyone wanting to purchase one locally rather than bring one.

Families, Children and Accessibility

Haifaa Mall’s single-floor layout is a genuine, well-documented practical advantage for families with strollers, young children, or mobility considerations, removing the need to navigate escalators or lifts between levels — a point several reviewers make explicitly and positively. The cluster of indoor children’s entertainment venues detailed above (Billy Beez, Funky Monkey, Red Sea Beach, Ghayma, Challenge Round, and a standalone VR arcade) gives the mall a genuinely strong documented offer for families with children roughly ages one through twelve, arguably its best-supported strength in the entire record gathered for this guide. Ghayma’s day-nursery service, in particular, is useful for a parent wanting supervised childcare for an hour or more while shopping alone, rather than a play-and-leave arrangement.

For older visitors or anyone with mobility limitations, no source specifically documents wheelchair access, accessible restrooms, or other formal accessibility infrastructure at Haifaa Mall — a genuine gap in the available record rather than a confirmed absence. The single-floor design at minimum removes vertical-access barriers that would otherwise require confirmed working lifts, which is one accessibility advantage this guide can state with confidence even without a formal accessibility statement from the operator. Visitors with specific mobility needs should contact the mall directly (+966 9 2000 0262) before travelling to confirm current facilities, since this guide found no operator statement on the matter to rely on.

Costs and Value

As a shopping venue, Haifaa Mall’s basic browsing and window-shopping is, like any mall, free; costs are driven entirely by what a visitor chooses to buy or which paid attractions they use. On cinema pricing, treat the SAR 34–60 range collected across three different dated sources above (Bayut.sa, July 2024; Saudipeek, April 2025; Wingie, September 2025) as the realistic band for a standard ticket, with premium formats like 4DX or VIP suites likely costing more, and confirm current pricing directly with Muvi Cinemas before booking. On children’s entertainment, Saudipeek’s April 2025 figures — roughly SAR 45–90 for a half-day to full-day ticket at Billy Beez depending on age and promotion, SAR 55–77 at Funky Monkey, SAR 75–88 at Red Sea Beach, and SAR 15–30 per activity at Challenge Round — give a reasonable planning benchmark for a family budgeting an entertainment-focused visit, though these figures were not independently corroborated against a current operator pricing page and should be treated as approximate.

On value relative to Jeddah’s larger malls: this is where Haifaa Mall’s honest positioning becomes clearest. It does not compete with Red Sea Mall or Mall of Arabia on breadth of luxury retail, entertainment scale (neither an IMAX screen nor a KidZania-style flagship attraction is documented here, both of which feature at Mall of Arabia per this series’ article 96), or sheer size. What it offers instead is convenience for residents of the surrounding central-Jeddah neighbourhoods, a quieter and less crowded shopping environment according to consistent reviewer testimony, ample and easy parking, and a genuinely well-regarded children’s entertainment cluster, all without the longer travel time to the city’s northern retail corridor where Red Sea Mall and Mall of Arabia both sit. For a pilgrim or short-stay visitor without a specific reason to be in Al-Ruwais already, the larger malls remain the more efficient use of limited time; for someone staying nearby, or wanting a lower-key alternative for an afternoon with children, Haifaa Mall is a reasonable, honestly modest choice.

Seasons, Weather and Timing

Jeddah’s climate is hot and humid essentially year-round, with the most intense heat and humidity from roughly May through September — general Red Sea coastal context that applies here exactly as it does to every other Jeddah venue in this series, and is covered in more depth in article 103 on the Corniche. An indoor, air-conditioned mall like Haifaa Mall is, as with any Jeddah shopping centre, a sensible refuge during peak summer heat, though one dated (2015-era) TripAdvisor review specifically complained about weak air conditioning on that visit — worth bearing in mind as a possible, if unconfirmed as ongoing, service inconsistency rather than assuming climate control is flawless.

During Ramadan, based on the general pattern observed at this mall’s sister Cenomi properties (Aziz Mall, Mall of Arabia) via Time Out Jeddah’s roundup, expect the mall’s evening and late-night hours to become significantly busier than daytime, with crowds building after Maghrib prayer and iftar and continuing well past midnight — a pattern common across Saudi retail during the holy month and one a visitor should plan around, arriving either in the relatively quiet late-morning to early-afternoon window or accepting a livelier, more crowded evening atmosphere. During Hajj season, given Haifaa Mall’s distance from Makkah and its lack of any pilgrim-specific services or facilities documented in this guide, it is not a venue most pilgrims would have practical reason to visit; the mall’s relevance is to Jeddah residents and general visitors rather than to Hajj or Umrah itineraries specifically, and this guide will not manufacture a pilgrimage connection where none exists.

Nearby Places to Combine

Given Haifaa Mall’s central Al-Ruwais location, it sits at a reasonable midpoint between two of this series’ other Jeddah subjects: Al-Balad, the historic old town covered in article 84, and the Jeddah Corniche waterfront, covered in article 103, both of which are more likely to be a pilgrim’s or heritage-focused visitor’s primary reason for being in this part of the city. A realistic itinerary might combine a Corniche walk or an Al-Balad heritage visit with a stop at Haifaa Mall for a meal, air-conditioned relief from the heat, or children’s entertainment, rather than treating the mall as a standalone destination worth a dedicated trip from further afield. For visitors prioritising retail specifically, Red Sea Mall (article 95) and Mall of Arabia (article 96) remain the more comprehensive options and are the more likely single-mall choice for a visitor with only one shopping stop to spare during a short Jeddah stay.

Common Misconceptions and Traveller Warnings

The clearest, most consistently repeated warning across the review record is a expectations-management one rather than a safety concern: several reviewers, across multiple years, arrive expecting a large, comprehensive shopping destination on the scale of Jeddah’s bigger malls and leave describing Haifaa Mall as merely “average,” “just OK,” or “not diverse” — not because the mall has declined, but because its actual scale and market position (a modest neighbourhood centre, per the ANB Capital equity analyst’s own “Category C” grading) was never comparable to Red Sea Mall or Mall of Arabia in the first place. A visitor who understands going in that this is a local, mid-market mall rather than a flagship retail destination is far less likely to be disappointed than one expecting otherwise.

On tenant turnover and vacancy: as noted above, a detailed 2015-dated TripAdvisor review described several long-closed storefronts and incomplete stock ranges on that visit, and a separate 2019-dated Arabic review similarly mentioned shuttered shops. This guide found no evidence of a current, ongoing vacancy crisis — Cenomi’s own live store directory, fetched directly for this guide, showed dozens of currently operating named tenants — but the recurring nature of these complaints across two different years suggests some degree of tenant churn has been a persistent, if not constant, feature of this particular mall’s operating history, more so than at the larger, more actively marketed Cenomi properties like Red Sea Mall, which article 95 documents as having added over twenty new retail concepts in a single 2025 leasing push. A visitor should not be surprised to find the occasional empty unit.

No source consulted for this guide raised specific concerns about taxi overcharging, counterfeit goods, or crowd-safety issues unique to Haifaa Mall — a contrast with some of Jeddah’s more heavily tourist-trafficked venues, likely reflecting the mall’s more local, less internationally-touristed customer base. General Jeddah ride-hailing cautions apply as they would anywhere in the city: confirm fares in-app before travelling and be aware that airport pickups in particular can carry a demand-based multiplier, per the Reddit and House of Saud sources cited above. On the Manuel Market supermarket specifically, the mixed 2025-dated customer service and pricing complaints noted earlier are worth bearing in mind if grocery shopping is a primary reason for a visit, though they sit alongside equally recent positive reviews praising the same store’s range and cleanliness.

One further caution on outdated online information: as this guide has detailed at length, opening-hours listings for this mall genuinely conflict across sources of different vintages, with TripAdvisor in particular still showing what looks like a legacy split-shift schedule likely superseded by Saudi Arabia’s broader retail-hours reforms. This is a documented, general problem with online listings for smaller, less actively managed venue pages, and a sensible visitor confirms hours directly rather than trusting the first search result.

Lesser-Known Facts

Haifaa Mall’s cinema, according to Saudipeek’s April 2025 account, opened in 2019 as part of the wave of new Saudi cinemas that followed the Kingdom’s lifting of its decades-long cinema ban in 2018 under the Vision 2030 entertainment-sector reforms — meaning the mall itself, if the 2011 opening figure is accurate, operated for roughly eight years without an in-house cinema, a detail that places its current entertainment offer as a genuinely newer addition to an older retail shell rather than part of the mall’s original design.

The district the mall sits in, Al-Ruwais, carries a specific and rarely mentioned historical footnote: it was the site of the December 2004 attack on the US Consulate in Jeddah, a fact noted in Arab News’s own 2009 historical profile of the district before the article moves on to the area’s longer fishing-community history and its planned redevelopment — a reminder that a district’s history, like this guide’s approach throughout, should be reported honestly rather than smoothed over for a tourism narrative.

The ANB Capital equity research report’s grading of Haifaa Mall as a “Category C” asset within Cenomi Centers’ broader portfolio — contributing just 2.7% of the group’s total gross leasable area and 1.2% of its rental revenue — is a genuinely unusual level of specific financial transparency for a mall of this type to have on the public record, and it exists purely as a side effect of Cenomi Centers being a listed company subject to equity analyst coverage, not because of any tourism or retail-industry documentation effort aimed at the mall itself. Few of Jeddah’s smaller malls have this kind of independently verifiable financial footprint on record at all.

Timeline

  • ~150–200 years ago — Al-Ruwais established as a fishing and sailing community on what was then Jeddah’s open coastline, per Arab News (2009) and the Okaz (2013) — sources disagree by roughly 50 years on the district’s exact age.
  • December 2004 — The US Consulate attack takes place in Al-Ruwais district, per Arab News.
  • June 2009 — Jeddah’s mayor signs off on a formal Al-Ruwais redevelopment plan covering roughly 1.8 million square metres, per Arab News.
  • November 2009 — Arab News publishes a detailed profile describing Al-Ruwais’s transformation plans and historical identity.
  • 2011 — Haifaa Mall opens, per Saudipeek and the RLI Connect leasing summary — not independently confirmed by a primary source.
  • 2018 — Occupancy recorded at 85.6%, per Saudipeek’s citation of that year’s statistics — a figure still being repeated in 2025-dated guides.
  • 2018 — Saudi Arabia lifts its cinema ban nationwide as part of Vision 2030 entertainment reforms, the broader context for the mall’s cinema opening.
  • 2019 — Muvi Cinemas branch opens inside Haifaa Mall, per Saudipeek — not independently confirmed by Muvi’s own site.
  • 2022 — Arabian Centres Company, the mall’s operator, rebrands as Cenomi Centers, per Cenomi’s 2022 annual report.
  • 2023 — RLI Connect’s mall-demographics leasing summary records Haifaa Mall’s GLA at 34,000 square metres, 142 units, and 3,556 parking spaces.
  • 2025 — ANB Capital’s equity research classifies Haifaa Mall as a “Category C” Cenomi asset with 33,757 square metres of GLA and a lease running to 2032; MarketScreener (August 2025) confirms Haifaa Mall’s continued place in Cenomi’s active property list.
  • 2025–2026 — Cenomi’s own website and Muvi Cinemas’ Arabic-language page for the branch remain live and current as of this guide’s research, indicating ongoing operation.

Practical Takeaways

  • Haifaa Mall is open and trading as of mid-2026, on the weight of corporate, financial-analyst, and review-platform evidence — but this is inferred from converging indirect signals, not a single definitive confirmation, and that distinction matters for how much trust to place in the rest of this guide’s detail.
  • It is a single-storey, mid-sized neighbourhood mall in Jeddah’s Al-Ruwais district, at the Madinah Road/Palestine Street intersection — smaller and more modest than Red Sea Mall or Mall of Arabia, and an independent equity analyst’s own “Category C” grading confirms that relative scale.
  • Opening year (2011), floor count, gross leasable area (32,946–34,000 sqm across three sources), and store count (100–150+ depending on source) all carry genuine, unresolved conflicts between sources — treat every specific figure in this guide as the best available estimate, not a settled fact.
  • Strongest documented draws: children’s entertainment (Billy Beez, Funky Monkey, and others), the Manuel Market supermarket, ample single-level parking, and a quieter shopping atmosphere than Jeddah’s larger malls.
  • Documented gaps: no confirmed electronics retailer, no confirmed dedicated gold jeweller, only one named abaya retailer, and no Haifaa-Mall-specific Ramadan or Eid hours found anywhere in the public record.
  • Opening hours are genuinely disputed between sources of different vintages — confirm directly (+966 9 2000 0262) before travelling, especially around midday, when a legacy split-shift closure may or may not still apply.
  • Not a pilgrimage or Hajj-season destination in any practical sense; its relevance is to Jeddah residents and general visitors, not to Umrah or Hajj itineraries.

Sources

Official and operator sources

Independent and trade sources

A Note on Method. This guide is built entirely from secondary sources — retail-industry blogs, an equity-analyst report, a corporate leasing summary, TripAdvisor review aggregation, and general Jeddah transport and district-history reporting — because no primary, dated announcement of Haifaa Mall’s founding, no independent journalistic feature specifically about the mall, and no complete official fact sheet from its operator could be found. Every figure for opening date, size, floor count, and store count that appears above is flagged with its source and its date precisely because those figures conflict across the available record, sometimes significantly, and resolving that disagreement by guesswork would have produced a false sense of precision this guide is not entitled to. Some categories a reader might expect — gold retail, electronics, a full and current store list, and Haifaa-Mall-specific Ramadan hours — simply are not documented anywhere this guide could find, and are reported here as gaps rather than filled in with invented detail. Where general Jeddah, Cenomi-portfolio, or Al-Ruwais district context was used to give the reader something useful in place of site-specific evidence, that has been stated explicitly rather than left ambiguous. All prices, hours, and fares were checked against sources dated as shown above; Saudi retail pricing and hours change often, and a reader should reconfirm any specific figure directly with the mall or its tenants before travelling.

Frequently asked questions

Yes, as of mid-2026 it continues to operate as an active shopping centre on Palestine Street, though its tenant mix changes over time as newer malls draw the big international brands.

Roughly 9:30am to 11pm on most days, with Friday opening in the early afternoon after prayers. Hours can shift, so check before a special trip.

Jewellery, cosmetics, modest fashion and everyday shopping at gentler prices than the luxury malls - it is particularly popular with women shoppers.

Yes, prayer rooms are available, and the surrounding district has plenty of mosques within a short walk or drive.

About 15 to 20 minutes by car from the central corniche and roughly 20 to 30 minutes from King Abdulaziz International Airport, depending on traffic.