THE OFF-PEAK YEAR
By Ehtesham Shahid • Jul 21st, 2009Beyond Dubai. On the ground there are different sets of realities confronting different countries. Some are far too out of the loop to really get hit by the downturn. Qatar, for instance, currently receives only 0.9 million international visitors, out of which 90 percent are for business purposes. From these figures, there is clearly a large amount of work to do to build Qatar, and Doha, as a leisure destination.
Caroline Bremner, of Euromonitor International, says investing in Doha’s tourism offers is a good start. “These steps are critical to building its credentials as a leisure destination and will help underpin 10 percent arrivals growth per year, so that the country welcomes 1.7 million visitors by 2013,” she says. Tourist arrivals are indeed important, not only for the hotel sector, but also the broader service and retail sector.
Besides those blips on the tourist radar, Doha seems to have chosen to take the retail route to attracting tourists. A Jones Lang LaSalle report says about 500,000 square meters of retail space is expected to come online by 2011, which will double the retail stock within the city. That is not necessarily good news under the circumstances confirmed by the report itself. “Faced with this increased supply and declining global tourism, rentals in the Doha retail market are expected to decline in the short term,” the report reads. Although the level of leisure travel for sporting and other events is likely to increase in Doha, the business and convention sector will remain the major driving force of Qatar’s tourism mix.
Abu Dhabi has chosen to focus on family and cultural tourism, which observers say should hold the emirate in good stead. But, since it doesn’t overly rely on tourism, little sleep is lost.
Places like Oman are happy holding on to their ground as regional leisure destinations, and wouldn’t want to experiment at this time. However, construction activity isn’t drastically slowing down across the region.
According to Proleads research, Gulf countries have more than $140 billion worth of hotel projects under construction and 19 percent of the projects are being suspended or canceled as the sector faces a global slowdown. Of 893 hotel projects surveyed in the Gulf, 5 percent had been canceled, 14 percent put on hold, and 42 percent were underway.
Road to recovery. The same yardstick cannot apply to the entire region, but Dubai and its exploits in recent years have certainly raised the bar on tourism potential. As one would expect, Dubai has suffered the most in the face of the downturn. Euromonitor considers Dubai’s population decline of 17 percent a major concern. Then there is the real-estate bust, over half of the city’s development projects are on hold or delayed, and there are cases of expatriate migration and rising job losses.
