30,000 New Hotels Rooms for Dubai

Published: 21/01/2010

Latest figures released by STR Global show that there are 442 hotels and 120,440 hotel rooms on their way through the development pipeline in the Middle East/ Africa.

With numerous hotel developments having been completed in 2009, there has been a large increase in hotel rooms available for tourists in the region. By the end of December there were a total of 718,702 hotel rooms in the region, compared with 634,226 2 months prior – another 71,742 are under construction.

Out of the key markets in the region, Dubai has the most hotel rooms in the planning phase – nearly 30,000, and the number of rooms in the active construction phase is 15,291.

Following Dubai, Abu Dhabi has 13,701 rooms in planning and 6,939 already being constructed.

Dominating the hotel plans still are the luxury upper-scale rooms with 75,000 in the pipeline whilst the figure for economy rooms is just over 6,000.

The value of hotel projects currently under construction around the GCC is worth $7bn.

The majority of these projects are in the UAE ($4.4BN), followed by Saudi Arabia ($1.2bn), Qatar ($620m), Bahrain ($490m), Oman ($300) and finally Kuwait ($90m).

The region will most likely see 98 new hotels with over 29,000 rooms opening this year and 115 hotels with nearly 34,000 rooms opening next year.