Hotel sector booming in Middle East

With as many as 45 new 5 and 4 star hotels opening across the Persian Gulf region in the next three years, suppliers to the hospitality industry are looking forward to a bumper sales year.

The Emirate of Dubai alone is adding some 10,000 rooms to its hotel infrastructure in the next few years, according to Guy Wilkinson, Director and General Manager at The Consulting House, which caters to the region’s hotel owners and developers.

“September 11 brought about many changes to the world, one of them being the repatriation of Arab capital back to the Middle East,” Wilkinson said. “As wealthy Arab investors pulled their resources out of the US and, to a lesser degree, Europe, they focused their attention to the potential of the local real estate market and the hospitality industry has been a big beneficiary.”

Developers behind most of the new hotels and resorts, as well as a growing number of existing hotel owners and managers, are expected to combine to produce record visitor numbers at The Hotel Show, the region’s biggest hotel supplies event, from May 22-24.

“The regional hotel supplies market is booming and has become a major target for the big global names within the industry,” said Bernard Walsh, Managing Director of dmg world media, owners of The Hotel Show. “This is one of the reasons why this year’s event will be bigger and better than ever.”

A one-stop-shop for products and services vital for hotels, the event grew by more than 50 per cent last year. The organisers expect similar results in 2005 and have moved the event to the prestigious Dubai International Exhibition Centre where it will spread to a larger area, occupying three exhibition halls.

The Hotel Show will attract exhibitors hoping to cash in on major developments such as the US$8 billion Downtown Dubai, which will include the one of world’s tallest towers, the Burj Dubai, and at least ten hotel properties.

Another two new hotels have been confirmed as part of the US$5 billion Dubailand theme park, which will be twice the size of Florida’s Disneyworld. With details still emerging of the 90 new hotels to be built on two of Dubai’s three The Palm projects, one confirmed property is the US$650 million Atlantis, The Palm.

In Qatar, construction has begun on the US$2.5 billion The Pearl of the Gulf, which spreads over 400 hectares of reclaimed land. A US$1 billion land reclamation development taking shape off the coast of Bahrain will include hotels as well as commercial, residential and leisure buildings. Oman, meanwhile, recently launched The Waves, a US$805 million tourism and residential project near Muscat.

This hotel development has been inspired by significant growth in demand in selected Middle East luxury hotel markets. According to Wilkinson, the highest occupancies were achieved in Dubai (88 percent, up 15 percent on 2003), Doha (78 percent, up 6 percent), and both Abu Dhabi and Cairo (75 percent, up around 15 percent each). The highest achieved average daily rates were in Beirut and Dubai (more than US$200), while Kuwait achieved $190 and Manama and Doha, both around $125.

Bringing suppliers together with the region’s hotel owners, operators and developers, The Hotel Show has attracted the interest of exhibitors from as far afield as Australia, the Far East, Russia, South Africa and the United States, as well as from the major regional players. So far, ten national pavilions, from China, France, Portugal, Germany, Greece, Malta, Mexico, Spain, Turkey and the UK, have signed up to take part in the exhibition.