Despite its current troubles, there’s little doubt that Dubai will remain a popular tourist destination for many years to come. A little reputation management is going to be required in the short term to deal with extraordinary bile-filled nonsense such as Jane Fryer’s piece in the Daily Mail and countless other sensationalist stories but the future isn’t as bleak as it has been portrayed by some. The excess and ambition of Dubai has meant that when it’s down there are plenty in the queue to start the kicking.
However, as a tourist destination it’s not fatally flawed. It may have lost its lustre a little, but it was only a couple of years ago that hoteliers were boasting of near three-figures occupancy rates. Visitor figures for Dubai this year have even shown growth of 5% in the first half of 2009 in a difficult trading period. Unfortunately, the growth of tourist numbers has been exceeded by the growth in the number of rooms (17%) and occupancy was less than 70% on average.
To increase the number of hotel rooms by 17% without adversely affecting existing hotels would have required much greater growth than 5%, which is asking a lot of any destination, even without a recession. As a result, hotels are now offering huge discounts and RevPAR has dropped substantially.
A lot has been made of the comparison between Las Vegas and Dubai, with people remarking that Dubai doesn’t have the gambling which underpins the Vegas economy. But regardless of the gambling, Vegas still has a greater ratio of visitors to hotel rooms than Dubai.
The crash was always going to happen in Dubai, because the rate of growth was unsustainable. But Vegas itself has had its fair share of downturns over the years and has always bounced back. I’m sure Dubai will do the same, it just needs a cool head responsible for tourism to curb its growth and excesses.
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You sound like you work for the Dubai Tourist Board. Having visited Dubai on and off for the past couple of years, I don’t see how you can possibly defend it, let alone compare it to Las Vegas. Dubai is a Ghost Town now. Drive through the ‘luxury’ residential areas and you will see that 99% of properties are empty.
There is no reason for people to return to Dubai – there are no jobs, ex pats are treated like slaves, there are no human rights, it is 50 degrees in the summer.
Goodbye Dubai!