Why families across India are opening their homes to strangers

The modern homestay host is an unlikely institution. They are rarely hoteliers by trade or temperament. They’re more likely to be former corporate strategists or advertising executives, coffee planters or young creators answering booking inquiries, while simultaneously stirring a pot.

To open a home to strangers is a radical act: it means trading quiet evenings for communal dining tables and accepting that a house is no longer entirely your own. Yet, across India, families are opening their doors to strangers, offering an antidote to algorithm-driven travel through their own history, generational recipes, and lived human connections.

Most homestays do not begin with a rigid business plan. In Himachal’s Tirthan Valley, partners Dimple and Upendra (Uppi) Singh Kamra built a stone-and-wood cottage along the Kalwari stream in Deori village in 2016 to escape city life. “There wasn’t a single moment where we said, ‘Let’s start a homestay’,” Dimple recalls. “Friends visited, then friends of friends started offering to pay, and the house gradually acquired a public life.”

When they launched Gone Fishing Cottages in 2016, the romantic ideal of country living collided quickly with operational reality. “You realise your home is no longer a private sanctuary,” Dimple says. “You lose the simple luxury of stepping out in your pyjamas for morning tea when guests are already sitting on the porch.”

In Anjuna, Goa, Kavita Nair and her husband Manoj left high-pressure corporate careers in Mumbai in 2020 to build Parijaat. The two-room garden cottage attached to the main house sat empty for 11 months of the year, prompting them to open it in 2021 to paying guests with deep trepidation over how strangers might disrupt their family life. To survive the intrusion, boundaries had to be drawn.

When guests use the swimming pool, Kavita and Manoj draw the curtains of their residence. Manoj screens inquiries personally rather than relying on booking platforms. “An algorithm can fill rooms, but it cannot curate harmony,” Kavita explains. “If a group wants a party resort rather than a quiet home, we politely decline.”

In West Sikkim, 1,500m above sea level in Rinchenpong, Thendup Bhutia runs Yangsum Heritage Farm from a traditional Sikkimese farmhouse built by his great-grandparents in 1843. Two decades ago, as the family considered how to preserve and maintain a 44-acre estate that had been around for generations, they chose to open it to guests rather than let the house slowly become impossible to sustain, but decided to set boundaries.

The family altar room (choesham) remains private and off-limits to commercial life. Everything else—the wood-fired kitchen, the harvests (maize, paddy, millets, potatoes, ginger, turmeric and sweet potatoes), and the family’s stories—are shared. “Holding on to a historic timber structure requires significant upkeep, and sharing our culture was the most dignified way to sustain it,” says Thendup. Even strict state permit requirements for foreign visitors feel like a safeguard: “It acts as a natural filter, keeping away mass tourism and bringing us people who genuinely care about the region.”

For Shivambika Singh, opening up her ancestral home means sharing her family history. In 2022, she set up The Hill House with eight suites at her family estate in Nathdwara, Rajasthan, not far from the 17th century Shrinathji temple. Her father Ghanshyam had spent decades managing tea plantations in Assam before returning to turn the home into a countryside retreat. Making it work required deep operational shifts: her mother Nidhi trained their cook to shift from making informal dishes for the family to producing precise service-based meals. The food is traditional Rajasthani fare and includes dals, gatte ki sabzi and meat preparations, apart from cakes and puddings that Nidhi serves along with her signature brandy sauce. While Ghanshyam handles finances, Shivambika manages marketing and guest relations.

Making a meal that meets the standards of the hospitality business while retaining its home-cooked character takes a lot of effort. In Kerala’s Western Ghats, Vanilla County in Vagamon is one of the region’s oldest homestays, established in 1997. As unpredictable spice harvests made farming less dependable, Rani Vallikappen opened their plantation bungalow, built in 1947, to guests, creating a new livelihood rooted in food and hospitality.

Rani took charge of the kitchen, personally training local village women to cook traditional Syrian Christian dishes such as beef roast and fish moilee, refusing to alter flavour profiles for tourist palates. She was surprised to see how much the guests enjoyed the local flavours. “These aren’t curated recipes engineered for a hotel menu; they are exact family dishes,” says Mathew Joseph, Rani’s son, who is a pastry chef by profession and returned from New Zealand in 2021, where he worked at artisanal bakeries.

To keep the business from consuming their lives, the family eventually built a separate personal residence on the compound. “Hospitality gave our ancestral house the revenue to stay standing, but keeping it as an actual home is what keeps it alive.”

Beyond managing guest expectations and operational challenges, the subtle transformations that come from opening their homes keep these individuals going. At Parijaat, breakfast at the garden table stretches past noon. At The Hill House, local staff is employed from nearby tribal hamlets. When guests walk through the gate at Gone Fishing, Dimple sees their shoulders drop as they let out a sigh of relaxation. “Life may have been simpler without the hospitality, but far less rich in surprise,” she says.

Homestays offer something that hotels never can: a lived experience of a family, their history, culture and cuisine. By opening their doors, these families allow their homes to adapt, evolve, and become more fully themselves.

Insia Lacewalla is a Goa-based food and travel writer.