Qatar Hotels and the Credit Crunch

I recently went on to booking.com to look up Qatar hotels.

I was hoping to see some reduced prices in the wake of the global downturn.

Not only did prices still seem high, there were also very few available rooms.

Qatar Hoteliers to Weather Downturn?

Perhaps because of the continuing high occupancy, Qatar is hoping its hotels will weather the credit crisis.

It certainly has much less of a fall to contend with than Dubai - according to an article in AIM Info, whereas Dubai had almost seven million visitors in 2007, Qatar had less than a million.

Many of Qatar’s visitors are not true tourists, but people looking for business opportunities, those coming for conferences and people visiting friends and families.

Qatar is also targeting the short stay, top end of the market - a move reflected by hotels which are luxurious but low key compared to those of Dubai, as well as its investment in cultural icons such as the Islamic Museum.

High Occupancy Rates

As suggested by our brief foray into Booking.com, occupancy has remained reasonable - consistently above 60% for all tiers of hotels in 2008. And that’s despite Qatar’s hotels being the most expensive in the world!

However, Qatar does not just need to maintain visitor numbers in 2009 - it needs to increase them.

The Need to Grow

As we saw with Dubai in our Sunday's blog post, Qatar’s plans depend on a big increase in visitor numbers.

Two hotels are opening next month alone - March should see both the W hotel and the Hyatt hotel opening in the West Bay area.

By 2012 it hopes to have quadrupled its hotels rooms - and almost doubled the amount of planes in its fleet.

Although if its airport lives up to its capacity of 50,000,000 passengers a year, filling hotel rooms should be the least of its problems!

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